Ready to WOW Your Friends? Learn How to Create Eye-Catching Animated GIFs in Seconds with This Mac Trick!
Animated GIFs are everywhere. They’re being used by marketers, bloggers, and social media gurus to capture attention and entertain audiences. They’re perfect when you want to add some visual interest to a blog post or a Facebook update. And, if you want to impress your friends with your tech-savvy skills, creating an animated GIF is an excellent way to do it.
In this article, we’re going to show you a quick Mac trick that will help you create eye-catching animated GIFs in seconds. And, the best part is that you don’t need to be a technical genius to do it.
Are you ready to start WOWing your friends?
Step 1: Prepare Your Video
The first step is to find a video clip that you want to convert into an animated GIF. You can use any video file format that is compatible with Mac OS (MP4, MOV, AVI, etc.).
Next, you’ll need to open your video in QuickTime Player. To do this, navigate to your video file and double-click on it. Once your video is open, use the slider bar at the bottom of the screen to select the portion of the video that you want to use for your animated GIF.
Step 2: Convert Your Video to GIF
Now that you have selected the portion of the video that you want to use, it’s time to convert it into a GIF file. To do this, you need to open the “Export As” dialog box. You can do this by clicking on “File” in the top menu bar and selecting “Export As” from the drop-down menu.
In the “Export As” dialog box, you’ll see a dropdown menu labeled “Format”. Click on this menu and select “Animated GIF” from the list of options.
Step 3: Adjust the Settings
Once you have selected the “Animated GIF” format, you’ll need to adjust some settings to get the best possible output.
First, adjust the “Looping” option. This will determine whether your animated GIF will loop infinitely or only play once. If you want your GIF to loop infinitely, select “Forever” from the drop-down menu.
Next, adjust the “Quality” option. This will determine the visual quality of your animated GIF. If you want a higher quality output, select “Best” from the drop-down menu.
Finally, adjust the “Size” option. This will determine the size of your animated GIF file. If you want a smaller file, select a smaller size from the drop-down menu.
Step 4: Save Your Animated GIF
Now that you have adjusted your settings, click on the “Save” button to save your animated GIF. Give your file a name and choose a destination folder.
Congratulations! You’ve just created an eye-catching animated GIF in seconds.
Conclusion
Animated GIFs are a fantastic way to add some visual interest to your blog posts, social media updates, or just to impress your friends. And, with this quick Mac trick, you can create eye-catching animated GIFs in a matter of seconds.
So, start experimenting with your favorite videos and see what kind of animated GIFs you can create. And, don’t forget to share your creations with your friends and followers. Happy creating!
GIFs are just everywhere – from social media networks to the popular tech blogs. Besides being normal images, they contain multiple images that play sequentially and give you the illusion of a video file. Creating a GIF image is not difficult, and we have already covered how you can create one on your Mac using an app.
If you would prefer creating a GIF without using a third-party app, you can now do so using the most convenient thing you do on your Mac: the right-click. By installing a utility and creating a service in Automator, you can allow yourself to create as many GIFs as you want by just right-clicking on the images you wish to include in the animated GIF image.
Here’s the procedure for it:
Making Animated GIFs with Right-Click
In order to make a GIF image using right-click, you need to have Homebrew, a package manager for Mac, installed on your machine. The following guide takes care of this as well for you.
Installing Homebrew on Your Mac
Homebrew lets you install a number of packages on your Mac by just using the Terminal app. Here’s how to install this package manager on your Mac:
Launch Terminal by clicking on Launchpad in your dock and searching for and clicking on Terminal.
When Terminal launches, type in the following command:
Press Enter on the following screen to allow Homebrew to be installed. Then, wait for it to be installed.
When Homebrew is installed, run the following command in Terminal and make sure it says “Your system is ready to brew.”
Homebrew has been successfully installed on your Mac. Now you need to install a utility using Homebrew.
Installing ImageMagick using Homebrew
Launch Terminal.
When it launches, type in the following command and press Enter. It should install the ImageMagick utility on your machine.
Wait for the utility to be installed on your Mac. When it’s installed, you should see the following screen.
ImageMagick has been successfully installed. Here’s the actual task.
Creating an Automator Service for Making GIFs
Launch Automator by clicking on Launchpad in your dock and searching for and clicking on Automator.
When Automator opens, click on the “File” menu and select “New.”
On the following screen you will be asked what kind of document you would like to create. Choose “Service” as the document type and click on “Choose.”
On the screen that follows select “files or folders” from the first drop-down menu and “Finder” from the second drop-down menu.
Drag and drop “Get Selected Finder Items” from the Actions panel over to the workflow.
Drag the “Run Shell Script” action as well over to the workflow panel.
Select “as arguments” from the “Pass input” dropd-own menu under the Run Shell Script section in the workflow panel.
Type in the following command into the Shell box. It is a script that will create a GIF for you.
Your service is now ready. Save it by clicking on the “File” menu and selecting “Save…”
Enter “Create Animated GIF” as the name and click on “Save” to save the service. You can use any name for the service, though.
Once the service has been saved, exit out of the Automator app.
- To test the script, select some images on your Mac, and then right-click on any one of them and select “Services” followed by “Create Animated GIF.” It will create an animated GIF image out of the selected images.
The GIF image will be saved on the desktop with the name “animatedimage.gif.”
Conclusion
While there may be a number of apps to help you create animated GIFs, the above method gets the job done for you from the context menu itself.
Mahesh Makvana is a freelance tech writer who’s written thousands of posts about various tech topics on various sites. He specializes in writing about Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android tech posts. He’s been into the field for last eight years and hasn’t spent a single day without tinkering around his devices.
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