Gifs in Keynote v6

So I love gifs. Maybe you know that by know if you read some of my other posts. One of the things I liked about Keynote was its ease of use on adding gifs. Sitting down with my new MacBook Pro I was eager to start a presentation I had coming up, but then Keynote ruined my day. The newest version (v6) doesn’t support dragging and dropping in gifs that automatically animate. They only appear as a static image and are treated as such. However, there does seem to be a work around!

Here’s how to get gifs working in your Keynote presentation!

Navigate to your gif in Finder

Make a duplicate of your gif and change the file extensions of the copy to “.mov”

Drag the duplicate into keynote

Click Optimize!

Now in the Inspector window, select “Movie.” Then make sure Repeat is in “Loop” mode and “Start movie on click” is unselected.

Boom!

It should just work. But sometimes… it doesn’t.

Dialog box of sadness

So here’s what to do…

First try to just drag and drop again. This solves the issue 90% of the time.

Try again.

If that didn’t work, try dragging in the original gif

Select the “Image” tab in the inspector and click “Replace”

Choose the duplicate file with the .mov extension and you should see the “Optimize” dialog appear.



There you have it.

Now get back to making awesome presentations!

Thankfully we don’t have to die of boredom anymore!