In technical terms, GIF is a Graphic Interchange Format, and in common man’s language, it is simply a moving set of pictures. GIFs have become a sort of rage, thanks to social media attention and vehement usage in day-to-day lives. GIFs are more expressive than an image and are also much more enjoyable as compared to a still picture. Sharing GIFs has become a part of life, and everyone wants to do that with their friends. Being a MAC owner, we know all the struggles you got through to find that right app for a simple task. If you have been missing out on the GIF fun, it is time to get you back on the horse. We have compiled a list of Top 10 apps that will allow every Mac owner to create GIFs easily.
Best GIF Maker Apps for Mac OS
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1. GIPHY Capture
GIPHY Capture is one of the most widely used and loved apps for GIF creation due to its simplicity and ease of use. The app is free of cost and allows users to capture anything that is on their screen and turn it into a GIF of up to 30 seconds. A couple of clicks is all you need to get the work done; one click starts the process while another click stops it. Now all you need to do is add the relevant captions, adjust the export size of GIF, and you are done. If you are more of the professional kinds, the app even allows you to make edits more precisely and trim a clip at specific time frames.
Once you are done with all this and are satisfied with the final result, the next step is quite easy. Users can choose to store the GIF in their GIPHY account, or they can even share the GIF directly with their friends or family.
Download Giphy Capture
2. GIF Brewery
GIF Brewery is another completely free GIF creation app for Mac users. Created by Gfycat, this app is currently running on the third successful edition which says enough about its competence. It is intuitive yet powerful and simple to use. Whenever the user selects the ‘Create GIF’ option, the app intelligently looks for a frame. If the user selects more than two frames from the Frames pane, the app will only use the selected frames instead of all. In case no frame is detected, the app automatically ignores it and continue building the GIF despite everything.
The latest version comes packed with added features of screen recording, Gfycat integration, opening .gif files apart from many other fixes to bugs. Users can crop, resize or set frame rate-delay according to their wish. Also, the app offers a number of filters to make your GIF look the best.
Download Gif Brewery
3. Gifrocket
Gifrocket is a super-light and super-fast GIF building app for Mac users. It allows users to create GIF from videos with the help of an ultra-beautiful interface. In order to create a GIF of your liking, all you need to do is equip yourself with the app and get the required video file in your Mac. Once you have done this, open the app and simply drag the video file to the blank space in the app. Before you start doing so, we recommend that you take a look at the settings for best results. First, enter the start and end point of your GIF. Secondly, choose the width of the GIF you wish to create and lastly, select the quality of the GIF. The middle point at the slider i.e. 50% works perfectly fine for all types of GIF.
After having accomplished most of the task, rest of the task is totally in the hands of the app. The Documents folder is where you will find the created GIF. The only drawback of this app is that you need to reset the settings every time you want to create a new GIF.
Download Gif Rocket
4. LICEcap
Apart from creating a GIF for entertainment, they can even be used for work purposes and this is where apps like LICEcap come right in. LICEcap is actually short for Lightweight Image Composition Engine but despite the big name, the app is quite easy to use. A hollow frame appears on the top of whatever the user would like to capture. Once they size the window, the record button needs to be pressed. While recording, the app demonstrates a toolbar, pause the recording or even drag the frame to capture a different section of the screen. Once done, all the work is saved in a .gif format and users can choose to upload or simply save it.
The GIFs created are on the bigger side with the average size being around 0.5 MB. One of the most disappointing features of this otherwise amazing app is that there are no added features or options for editing the GIFs.
Install LICEcap
5. Smart GIF Maker
Another free yet highly useful app for Mac users is Smart GIF Maker. To make the process smooth for users, the makers have used an extremely simple user interface that is almost as easy as using any other generic app. Users can easily create new GIFs while also getting the option to modify existing GIFs with this app. Smart GIF Maker allows you to add or remove frames from a GIF or even a photo quite easily. Users even get the chance to set the loop counts and the frame duration for each of the GIF they create. Simply drag and drop the images to a frame while changing the order of frames according to your wish and you will have a GIF ready.
The app allows users to set frame duration for every frame at the same time. It even handles the previews way better than it used to before. Also to make things more convenient for the users, the app asks permission to import the created file or not.
Download Smart GIF Maker
6. GIF Maker
If you are looking for a more professional and high-quality app for creating GIFs, GIF Maker may just be your go-to app on your Mac device. The app is a paid one but nothing that cannot be afforded. The yearly subscription of the app starts at a minimal price of $2.99. The leading GIF website Giphy is the brains behind this app, and this makes the app even more accountable. It lets you convert videos into GIFs seamlessly, and you can choose the video from any video streaming website like YouTube, Vimeo etc. Once you have picked your source, upload the link to the app, select the portion of the video that you want to turn into a GIF and voila!
GIF Maker lets users add relevant captions to the created GIF without taking a lot of time to create one that is of very high quality. Once a GIF is created, it automatically gets uploaded to user’s account on Giphy and from there, the user can share or download the GIF. Doubtlessly, GIF Maker is one of the biggest and most power-packed apps for GIF creation on Mac and if you can invest a little bit of money, this may be a very good choice.
Download GIF maker
7. PicGIF
PicGIF is another app for Mac users to express their innovation and creativity in the form of a GIF. The app is quite versatile when it comes to gif creation and the quality of a created gif is simply mind-blowing. As opposed to the normally crappy and blurred gifs created by other apps, PicGIF creates extremely eye-pleasing gifs with supreme quality and stability. You can convert videos to GIFs or even use a batch of photos to create one. All you need is to select all the photos, adjust the fullness and finally choose the speed at which frames will flip. It’s a simple, easy-to-use and fast app, though the lack of proper cropping capability may be a sore point for users looking out for an extremely professional gif maker.
Mac Create Animated Gif
A drawback to this otherwise amazing Gif creator app is that there is no option that lets users include the original sound in the video. While many other gif apps do not allow sound inclusion, this may not exactly be that big of an issue.
Download PicGIF
8. Motion Stills
Google’s very own Motion Stills is one of the very few apps that lets users to actually make use of their live photos. The app automatically detects all the live photos found on your device and lets you create a gif of your own liking. The app edits each live photo to convert them into stable images by removing the shake factor. Once this is done, it simply converts those photos to GIFs or video files that can be shared across various platforms. A great addition to this app is that it allows the addition of sound to movie files and also allows users to upload a gif or movie directly to Instagram.
This comes as a huge relief since live photos cannot be uploaded directly Instagram in other gif makers and this app has finally made it possible to upload all those lovely live photos and share them with the world. Apart from all this, the app also comes packed with a fast-forward mode that lets users condense longer videos to really short ones.
Download Motion Stills
9. Gifable
Gifable lets users create original gifs that have been recorded directly from their Mac screens. Gifable is a one-in-all kind of package that does not require any other editing software to create the final gif. All users need to do is click and drag the mouse pointer to whatever area of the screen they want to get recorded. Once the recording is complete, the gif creation process begins immediately. As soon as the gif is processed and created, you will see a preview and then can save the finished gif to a designated folder.
Gif Creator Mac Free Online
The created gifs are quite good in quality and are perfect to be used for blog posts, tutorials as well as for daily social media posting. On the downside, Gifable lags behind other gif creation apps in terms of fps recording as it does not have the option for it. So if you can make do with no fps recording, Gifable is good to go.
Download Gifable
10. Gifox
Gifox is another cool gif creation app for Mac users with a clean interface and easy-to-use tools. The app has been designed quite beautifully while providing an even better option between images and full-blown videos. The app allows users to record their screen and convert that into animated gifs. This is a menu-bar app that is available for freeand also comes in a premium package for a price of $4.99. It uses window selection mode for continuous screen-capturing and comes along with advanced compression options. These options let users have total control over the output quality as well as the size of the output file. With Gifox, you get to decide what to record, how to record, what screen elements to include, fps as well as looping.
Gifox may just be one of the best options when it comes to product demos, micro-screencasts, animated videos and selective on-screen video captures. The one drawback we found while using this app is that the file size of the created gifs is far too large to be used on websites that get huge traffic. Such gifs take a lot of time to load and waste viewers time.
Download Gifox
Summarizing the GIF App Reviews
Best Gif Maker Mac
Gif Creator Mac Free Downloads
GIFs have gained so much popularity over the past few years even though this file format has been out in the open for quite a long time now. Not only are these file types entertaining, but they also help deliver a message in the shortest form possible. Mac users often find it difficult to get free apps that are highly capable in terms of the output and hence the need to create the above list. While all the above apps for Mac are highly useful, we would recommend GIPHY Capture, Gifox for freebies while GIF Maker is a good paid option