How To Export From Keynote As an Animated GIF

A new feature of Keynote 9 is the ability to export as an animated GIF file. These are useful to upload to social media or send via text message. The exported GIF includes all transitions, animations and special effects.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So a new feature of Keynote version 9 is the ability to export your presentations as animated GIFs. Let's take a look.
MacMost is brought to you by the more than 300 people that support it through its Patreon Campaign. Find out how you can become a part of it at macmost.com/patreon.
So let's get one thing out of the way first. Is it GIF or Gif? Well, I think either one's acceptable. But as a guy named Gary I gotta go with GIF. So Keynote 9 doesn't really add that much to Keynote. But one of the new features is the ability to export as an animated GIF. This is useful if you want to upload something to say Facebook or a website or even send it as a text message.
Here's one example. This is a plain normal presentation with 5 slides that you would normally show one after the other. No animation. No transitions. Nothing. So the basic functionality as you would File, Export to,  and the new feature is Animated GIF. You have to choose which slide so you need to fill in how many slides you want. I want all 5 slides. Now I get to choose a Resolution. You've got Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large. Now notice at the bottom it will tell you Duration and Resolution. Here it says 480 x 270. So that's what it means by Medium. If I go to Large it's 720 x 405 and Extra Large 1080 x 608. So I'll go ahead and just pick medium for this example.
Frame Rate really isn't going to matter that much for this presentation because every frame is just static. But it will matter when we look at animations later. Then Auto-advance is how quickly to go from one slide to the next. Since you can't interact with an animated GIF you can't click it to advance to the next slide. So it's just going to do that automatically. So we'll go with a full one second here. So we're going to get something that's 5 seconds long, 5 frames so it makes sense, 480 x 270.  We'll go Next and that will allow us to choose our destination. We'll Save it to the Desktop.
So here it is on my Desktop and if I select it and press the spacebar it will show it to me in QuickLook which doesn't render animated GIFs very well. It seems to go just from the first one to the last one after a period of time. So we're not going to use that. We're going to use animated GIFs in its native environment which is on a webpage or web browser. So I'm going to drag and drop it into Safari. It loads in Safari and you can see it advances through the slides automatically. Hits the end and it moves.
So let's look at what happens when you add transitions. So for this first slide I'll go to Animate in the sidebar here and I'll add an effect. So I'll have it go and do, let's say, a Dissolve. So it will dissolve from this to the next slide. The next one we'll go and do something a little more interesting. We'll do a Grid and on this one we'll add say a Fade and Move. Now when we go to Export we'll select slide one to four and we'll choose Medium again. 24 frames per second. So the frames per second really doesn't matter here because it gives more frames for the animation. 24 is okay. 15 it might seem a little choppy and 30 will seem really smooth but of course it will add more file size.
We'll have it Auto-advance every one second. Go to Next and then it will Export this to the Desktop. So let's drag this one to Safari. Now it will bring it in and you can see it's doing each transition as part of the animation. The file size is going to be significantly more because of all of those frames of animation there. So it's one thing to keep in mind.
Now there are all sorts of special effects you can use in Keynote. Like you can make text appear in weird and interesting ways. These will also export as part of the animated GIF. So here is a text box and we're just going to have a buildin effect here. We'll use something fun and interesting like the Comet effect, like that. Now when we export that to the animated GIF and then you can see it includes that effect there.
Finally, let's look at some animation. You can animate on a path in Keynote. So here I have a shape that's just on a single slide by itself. I will add an action effect here and I'll make it Move. When it does that it shows me this red path here. So I'm going to bend that red path and move this around here. I'm going to Option click on the path to create another point and move it around. So now I can preview it and I can see what it looks like. So as you can guess, of course, when you export to Animated GIF that that's all included.
So the options here are pretty basic. You can't delay any more than one second which would be useful if you're trying to show a presentation. Maybe you want to have each slide up there for three or four seconds so people can read the text. But you can also take a slide and, under Animate, you can change the transition from on Click to Automatically and then change the time. So notice I'm going to make this a ten second slide. Now when I go to Export I'll say I want to go from one to five, as before, one second Auto-advance. Notice Duration is now fourteen seconds. So four of those slides are going to Auto-advance and do it at one second. But the slide here that I set to ten seconds, that will actually sit there for 10 seconds. So you can actually really set the timings for each slide specifically.
But if you really want to play with the size, the dimensions, of the GIF and maybe some other features and maybe get some more compression out of it you're still probably better off using a specialized app to convert a video to a GIF and then you export from Keynote as a video and then you import it into the specialized app. But this is a really good way for most uses. It's really quick and easy to do to get an animated GIF to share online.
How To Export From Keynote As an Animated GIF

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information
