How to Make a GIF from Photos: Order, Timing, Size and Loops

Timing: how long each photo holds

A GIF has no frame rate as such. Each frame carries its own delay, which the GIF89a specification stores in hundredths of a second — which is why the maker's timing moves in 10 ms steps. For photos, the frame-rate slider (1–30 fps) sets the default hold: at 1 fps each photo stays for one second, at 2 fps for half a second.

Individual frames can then be timed on the timeline: select one and set how long it holds, anywhere from 10 ms to 10 seconds, or apply one delay to every frame at once. A longer hold on the last frame gives the loop a pause before it restarts, which reads far better than an abrupt jump back to the start.

With Pro, a crossfade of up to a second dissolves each photo into the next instead of cutting — the difference between a slideshow and a flicker.

Loop once, or loop forever

Looping is not in the original GIF specification at all; the loop count lives in an extension block added on top of it, which is how a GIF can say "play three times" or "play forever". Free exports loop forever, which is what almost every chat, email and web GIF wants. A fixed number of plays, from one to twenty, is a Pro setting — useful when the animation should end on its final frame rather than snap back to the first.

Whichever you choose, watch a full cycle in the preview. It plays the exact frames at the exact delays that will be exported, and timing problems show up at the seam between the last frame and the first.

Make every photo the same shape

Photos from one camera match; a folder of phone pictures rarely does. A GIF has one canvas size, so every frame is fitted into a single output shape: match the sources, square, landscape (16:9), portrait (9:16) or classic (4:3). Then scale to frame decides what happens to a photo whose shape differs:

• Fit keeps the whole picture and fills the gutters with white, black, a colour of your choice, or see-through.
• Fill crops each photo to the edges — the tidiest look, as long as nothing important sits near a border.
• Stretch distorts. Avoid it for anything with faces or text.

If framing matters photo by photo, crop them before they go in — resizing a set of images covers doing it consistently — and check social media image sizes if the GIF is headed for a particular platform.

Keeping the file small

GIF weight comes from pixels × frames × colour complexity. Halving the width quarters the pixel count, so longest side is by far the strongest control: 480 px is plenty for a chat window. The free plan exports up to 640 px, Pro up to 4096 px.

• Fewer frames. A ten-photo slideshow is ten frames; do not pad it with duplicates when a longer delay does the same job.
• Colours. A GIF frame holds at most 256 colours. Photographs need most of them; flat graphics often look the same at 64. Colour count and dithering sit in the advanced settings on every plan.
• Presets. Light (5 fps, 96 colours, 480 px), Standard (8 fps, 192 colours, 640 px) and Smooth (12 fps, 256 colours, ordered dithering) are starting points; every control stays adjustable.

Frames already store only the region that changed since the one before, which saves a great deal on screen recordings and very little on a slideshow, where every pixel changes at each cut. If a finished GIF is still too heavy, the GIF compressor can aim at a target file size and drop frames while keeping the total duration, and the GIF resizer sets exact pixel dimensions without touching the per-frame timing.

Making a GIF from a Live Photo

A Live Photo pairs a still with a short video clip, and the GIF maker does not read one directly. Turn it into an ordinary video first: at the time of writing, Apple's steps are to open the Live Photo in Photos, tap the More button and choose Save as Video, which puts a new video in the Recently Saved album (Apple Support).

Add that video to the GIF maker as a clip, set its start and end points, and pick the portrait shape so the frame is filled rather than letterboxed. The free plan uses up to 15 seconds from each clip.

When a short MP4 is the better choice

GIF's reach is its whole case: it plays anywhere an image does, loops without a click and needs no player. Its costs are 256 colours a frame, no sound, and size. In one web.dev example a 3.7 MB GIF became a 551 KB MP4 and a 341 KB WebM (web.dev). If the destination accepts video — most social platforms, and any website you control — a short, muted, looping MP4 will be smaller and sharper. Image to video builds a slideshow video from the same photos, with per-slide durations and transitions.

Keep the GIF for chat, email, documentation and issue trackers. For frame-level work — deleting, duplicating or reordering frames, per-frame delays, reversing or ping-ponging — the maker's Open in GIF Editor button carries the result into the GIF editor, which is free with no watermark on the export. Starting from a clip rather than photos? See converting a video to a GIF.