MOV to GIF converter

Mostly Mac users with a screen recording to show someone. Shift-Command-5 and QuickTime Player save MOV, and the places it is going often want a GIF: a GitHub README or pull request, a bug report, a docs page, a Slack thread or an email where a video would sit there as an attachment nobody opens. A GIF plays by itself, loops, and needs no player. The clip is usually a few seconds of a click, a hover or a bug happening, which is exactly what GIF is good at.

Three settings decide the size of the GIF: how wide it is, how many frames a second it keeps, and how long it runs. For a screen recording, start at 640 to 800 pixels wide and 10 frames a second, and keep it to the few seconds that show the point. Go to 960 pixels when small text has to be legible and the screen is mostly still; drop to 480 for a thumbnail-sized loop or a recording that scrolls a lot.

Width matters most. Every pixel of a GIF frame is stored, so doubling the width makes four times the picture. Frame rate matters less than you would expect for a screen: this page only redraws the parts of a frame that changed, so 15 frames a second costs little more than 10. Use the start and end boxes to cut the clip to the moment that matters; every second you cut is a second of frames you do not store.

A recording of someone typing into a form, opening a menu or clicking a button is mostly unchanged from one frame to the next. Those GIFs come out far smaller than the table above: a 20-second 1080p test clip of lines of text appearing in a window made a GIF of about 30 KB at 480 pixels. The bigger the moving part of the screen, the bigger the file, so close other windows and hide anything that animates, such as a clock or a busy sidebar, before recording.

If the GIF is still too big, shorten it first, then narrow it. Lowering the frame rate below 10 makes clicks look jumpy and saves less than either.

GitHub plays video in issues, pull requests and comments, so for anything longer than a short loop, with sound, or in full colour, drag the MOV straight in. A MOV or MP4 up to 10 MB works on a free plan, and up to 100 MB on a paid one. Video is also many times smaller than a GIF of the same clip, which matters on a docs page that loads it for every visitor.

Use a GIF where video does not play by itself: a README image that should loop without a click, an email, a chat app that only shows previews, or a bug tracker that takes images only. For a MOV that a site refuses, the MOV to MP4 converter makes an MP4 in seconds without re-encoding.

A good bug-report GIF shows one thing: the click, then what went wrong. Record only the window (Shift-Command-5, then Record Selected Portion), start just before the action and stop just after, and trim the rest here. Our guide to recording bug reports covers what to capture so a developer can reproduce it, and how to screen record on a Mac covers the recording itself.

For a README, commit the GIF to the repository and link it with a relative path, or drag it into an issue comment and copy the link GitHub gives it. Either way, keep it under 10 MB.

Do not make a GIF of anything long, with sound, or where colour matters. A GIF has no sound at all, and past 20 or 30 seconds it gets large quickly; a MOV or MP4 attached to the issue or the message is smaller and looks better.

Converting cannot fix the recording. A blurry or low-resolution MOV makes a blurry GIF, and a GIF wider than the recording does not add detail, so this page never makes one wider than the video. Keep the MOV: once colours are cut to 256, they do not come back.