Introduction

Since the launch of iPhone 6S in 2017, Apple has introduced Live Photo as a way to attract people’s attention. It has been 3 years on and live photos now become a very common way to capture dynamic moments in your live, giving life and infusing a sense of liveliness into those static images. More than ever, it has given us an urge to share it with our friends through social media stronger than ever. But it also beg the question: how? GIF is a good answer.

It is a cool idea to turn a live photo into an animated GIF, and it is also easy to make it. Next, let’s see how together.

1. How to Make a Live Photo a GIF in the Photos App

The easiest way to make live photo into GIF is through Apple itself. In the album, there is such function for you to easily make GIF from live photo. Here let’s take a deeper look.

Make a Live Photo a GIF in iPhone


Steps on how to make live photo into GIF in the Photos App:

1)    Open Photos and select the Live Photos album. 

The 1st thing to learn how to make a live photo into a GIF is to locate the live photo. Just open the album and find the live photo you want to make a GIF from.


2)    Apply Loop or Bounce Effect in the album

Once you find the live photo, the next crucial step is to apply the right effect to make live photo into GIF. The right way is to swipe upwards from the bottom of the screen, then four GIF animation options would enfold before you, which are respectively Live, Loop, Bounce, and Long Exposure. Loop and Bounce is both ok to make GIF from live photo, you can tap on each to decide your choice

Apply loop effect in photos app
 
Loop VS Bounce:

Loop:    Loop means that your GIF made from the live photo would repeat forever, achieving a seamless effect by merging the beginning and end. 
Bounce:  Bounce means that the GIF would bounce back the other way and run the clip backwards once it reaches the end, which also repeat for an infinite time.

 

 

 

 

3) Share with your friends

Once you’ve applied the effect of Loop or Bounce, then the live photo is made successful into a repeating GIF. You’ve done the task to learn how to make a live photo into a GIF perfectly. Now you can share it with your friends through whatever medium you like, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

2.    How to Make a Live Photo a GIF with GIPHY?

The above method is the easiest way to make live photo into GIF in your camera roll without any app installation. If you would like to make a more exquisite and creative GIF with some captions and cool filter effects, here we recommend a third party app Giphy, which is a very cool GIF generator to make live photo into GIF, thus getting creative with GIF creation.

make live photo a gif

As a very comprehensive GIF library, Giphy also presents us way more options to make creative GIFs, including adding cool filters, texts, emoji, animation effects and so on, which allows you to share your new creations with your friends instantly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… Next we are going to learn how to make live photo a GIF with Giphy briefly.

Step 1: Open Giphy

Download it from the app store if you don’t have it on your phone.

Step 2: Make GIF from live photo

Tap the “+” button in the bottom center, here you have two options for making your GIF. You can either film a new GIF using the camera or importing the photos into this app so as to make GIF from live photo. Here we choose to import live photos into this app.

Make GIF from live photo

 

 

Step 3: Customize your own GIF

There are various options for customizing your own GIF in this app, like create a caption, add a filter, add some art effects, trim your GIF, and more.

Customize your own GIF

 

Step 4: Upload and share with your friends

When you finish customization with your GIF, you can tap the purple arrow button to upload it to Giphy. After that it would generate a link for sharing with your friends.

With the third-party app Giphy, you can make more creative GIF and customize it to your own styles, bring static photos or images to live, now you have learnt the way to make more creative GIFs with the effects of filters, cations, animations, etc.

3. How to Turn GIFs Back to Live Photos?

As we’ve spent a lot of paragraphs explaining the simple and more creative way to make a live photo a GIF, but what if we would like to learn how to make a GIF into a live photo? Is it possible to find a solution to the question “how to make a GIF a live photo”? Yes, the answer is positive. 


Making GIF back into a live photo is a new feature released by GIPHY, which allows users to save their favorite GIFs as live photos to their camera roll in order to set them as wallpaper. Next is a brief description on how to make a GIF into a live photo, and it is much easier than you think.


1)    Launch GIPHY, if you don’t have it, download it in the App Store
2)    Select your desired GIF
3)    Tap the three white dots to the bottom right of the GIF.

Convert image to gif on iphone
 

4)    Choose Convert to Live Photo
You can choose to save the GIF as Live Photo (Full Screen) or (Fit to Screen), which is up to you.

5)    Find the live photo in the camera roll

Convert image to gif with memories

Go to your Photos, find recently saved live photos, you would see the GIF has been already converted to a live photo.

Note: to double check whether it really works, you can view the live photo and share with your friends in ways you like. 

4. Extension: How to Turn a Video into a GIF and the Other Way?

After talking so much about how to make a live photo a GIF as well as how to make a GIF a live photo, let’s move to another topic: how to turn a video into a GIF and the other way? The answer is you might need a good video to GIF and GIF to video converter, here we recommend a free software to achieve this task, which is DVDFab Toolkit, allowing you to convert videos into GIFs and the other way easily.

Download this software immediately to use it for free (30-day free trial).

 Download Now  

4.1 Turn a Video into a GIF

DVDFab Toolkit is a fantastic video to GIF converter, start it up and then choose Image Tools > Video to GIF, and load in the video you would like to convert into a GIF and adjust relevant settings. To understand more about how to turn a Facebook video into GIF, click here to unlock the full tutorial.

4.2 Turn a GIF into a Video

Well, if you would like to turn a GIF into a video, then you would definitely need a good GIF to Video converter. Choose GIF to Video as the target tool, and import the GIF to edit it and convert as a video. 

Turn a GIF into a Video

 

Conclusion


All right. Here we would like to bring this article to an end as it has given you a comprehensive account of how to make a live photo a GIF, how to make a GIF into a live photo as well as the best method to turn a video into a GIF and the other way. Hope this lesson about GIF can help you to some extent, all right, if you would also like to know how to create GIF from images to make your own memes, check out this article.

Now enjoy your GIF creation journey!