Turn burst photos into a GIF or a boomerang, in your browser

A single photo can only fake motion: zoom into it, shake it, spin it. A burst already has the motion in it. Ten frames of a dog jumping for a ball are a tiny film, and turning them into a GIF or a boomerang takes about a minute once you know where your phone hid them.

The short answer

To turn burst photos into a GIF, save the frames you want as separate photos, then add them in order to a GIF maker that combines images, such as Gifsy's boomerang GIF maker. Set about 0.2 seconds per photo, turn Boomerang on if you want the motion to play back and forth, and download. It runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and you don't sign up.

Why a burst beats one photo

Real movement. A zoom or a shake moves the whole picture the same way, which is fine for a reaction GIF and useless for a jump, a toss or a splash. A burst captures the subject in different positions, so the GIF shows what actually happened. It's the same idea as Instagram's Boomerang, minus the video.

Step 1: take the burst

Every phone does this a little differently. What the makers' own help pages say:

• iPhone. In Camera, “swipe the Shutter button to the left to begin taking photos in rapid succession. Lift your finger to stop.” You can also hold Volume Up for bursts once you turn on Settings > Camera > Use Volume Up for Burst (Apple).
• Samsung Galaxy. Swiping the shutter to the nearest edge takes a burst or creates a GIF, depending on the “Swipe Shutter button to” camera setting (Samsung). So yes, a Galaxy can make a GIF by itself. Use a burst instead when you want to pick the frames, set the speed or make a boomerang.
• Google Pixel. Pixel's Top Shot “takes a burst of photos and automatically chooses your best shot” (Google). The help page doesn't say how to keep the rest of that burst, so on a Pixel the reliable route is to tap the shutter quickly several times.

Whatever the phone, hold it still. The GIF will show every wobble of your hands as the whole frame jumping, and nothing in this workflow can stabilise it afterwards.

Step 2: keep the frames as photos

On an iPhone, a burst shows up in Photos as one thumbnail. Tap it, tap Burst (number), then tap the circle on each frame you want to keep and tap Done. Apple's guide says each one is saved “as an individual photo”, and grey dots under the thumbnails mark the frames it suggests. Keep more than you think: five to ten frames, in a row, without gaps.

On Android it depends on the phone and the gallery app. Samsung's page doesn't say how bursts are grouped, so check that you can pick the frames one by one. If you tapped the shutter several times on a Pixel, they're separate photos already.

Easiest route: do the next step on the phone itself. Open the GIF maker in the phone's browser and pick the frames straight from your photo library. If you copy them to a computer instead and they end in .heic, some browsers won't open them; export them as JPEG first.

Step 3: make the GIF or boomerang

1. Open the boomerang GIF maker (it starts with Boomerang on and 0.2 seconds per photo), or the photo slideshow GIF maker for a plain loop.
2. Add the frames in shooting order. They play in the order you add them, and there's no drag-to-reorder yet.
3. Set the time per photo. 0.2 to 0.3 seconds reads as motion; 0.5 and up reads as a slideshow.
4. Click Make GIF, check the preview, download.

Each photo is cropped to a 480 × 480 square from the centre, and the GIF is built in the browser tab. Our own test: eight frames of a fox from a short clip, 0.2 seconds each, Boomerang on, made a 1.8 MB GIF with 14 frames. That fits Discord, GitHub and email easily; the GIF size limits guide has the rest.

Loop or boomerang?

A plain loop plays frame 1 to frame 10, then jumps back to frame 1. That works when the action ends where it began, like a spin or a wave. For almost everything else (a jump, a splash, someone walking into shot) the jump back is jarring.

A boomerang plays forward and then backward through the middle frames, so the last frame flows into the first and nothing ever snaps. It uses 2n − 2 frames: eight photos become 14 frames, not 16, because the two ends aren't repeated. At 0.2 seconds each, eight photos make a 1.6-second plain loop or a 2.8-second boomerang. It needs at least three photos; with two there's nothing to reverse through.

What goes wrong

• The whole frame jumps. The phone moved between shots. Retake it braced against something, or cut the frames where you moved the most.
• It stutters. A frame is missing from the middle of the burst, or the speed is too slow. Use frames in a row and try 0.2 seconds.
• The subject gets cut off. The GIF is a centre square. A landscape burst loses its left and right edges, and mixing portrait and landscape frames crops each one differently.
• The file is bigger than you expected. Every photo is a full frame, and Boomerang nearly doubles them. Drop a few frames before you drop the quality.
• The order is wrong. Remove the photos and add them again in shooting order.

If you have a Live Photo instead

A lot of “boomerang from photos” searches are really about iPhone Live Photos. The photo tools here can't read the short video inside one, but if you have that video as a file, the video to GIF and boomerang maker can (Live Photo videos are usually HEVC, so Safari is the safest browser for it). The good news is you may not need it: in the iPhone Photos app, open the Live Photo, tap the Live Photo button and choose Bounce, which Apple lists alongside Loop and Long Exposure (Apple). That's a boomerang, made on the phone.

Use a burst and Gifsy when you want a GIF file you can drop into Discord, Slack or a README, or when you're not on an iPhone. And if what you actually have is one good photo, not a burst, the guide to animating a photo into a GIF covers the single-photo effects, from spin to glitch.

FAQ

Sources

Phone steps come from each maker's own help pages, read on 25 September 2026: Apple, Burst mode, Apple, Live Photo effects, Samsung, camera settings and Google, Top Shot. The tool's behaviour (3-photo minimum for Boomerang, 2n − 2 frames, 480 × 480 centre crop) comes from Gifsy's own code, and the 1.8 MB figure is the example file on the boomerang page. Menus move between phone models and software versions, so if a step doesn't match your phone, the maker's page is the one to trust.

Want the photo itself to move in 3D instead of flat frames? That's the 3D photo maker.