Extracting animated gifs from PowerPoint
This is such a random thing but I'm so happy to have found a solution to this problem, and I want to share so that others may find it!
I use animated gifs a lot in my PowerPoint presentations to illustrate certain concepts — never for bells and whistles, always to show something that's better explained through movement. I create gifs in Photoshop (or a combination of Photoshop and other apps) and just insert them into slides. The problem is, I'm not always great about saving the original gif somewhere! Often the gifs end up only existing in the PowerPoint file itself. And sometimes I end up needing these gif files for other purposes, e.g. I might want to post them on a blog or website.
I've sometimes tried to right-click and "Save as Picture" or otherwise extract a gif from a presentation, with the hope of ending up with a perfect copy of the original gif file. This simply does not work. You end up with a gif file that displays just the first frame as a static image; the animation is lost. However, after literally years of wondering about this, I've found a solution!
For Windows users
I happen to be a Windows user — long story! Ask me about why! Anyway, here's the solution for getting a fully functional animated gif file out of a PowerPoint file for Windows. The shortest version of this process is this:
Change the name of your PowerPoint file from [whatever].pptx to [whatever].zip
That's right, you heard me. You're converting the PowerPoint file into a zip archive, just by changing the file extension.
Now, open that bad boy up.
Navigate to ppt, and then to media.
Your gif file will be there. However, depending on the size of your PowerPoint presentation, you might have to dig through tons of files to find the one you want, and the filenames might not be helpful at all.
So, I made up this modified process that isolates the file I need:
Slightly smarter method
Create a new PowerPoint file.
Go to your PowerPoint file where the animated gif lives, select just the gif, and copy and paste it into the new file.
Save the new file locally; name it whatever.
Navigate to that file. Rename the file from [whatever].pptx to [whatever].zip
Open the zip. Navigate to ppt, and then to media.
Your gif file will be there. In my case, it was called "image1.gif".
Drag this file locally somewhere, and that's your animated gif file, and it's formatted at its original dimensions. (This was something I was concerned about — TMI: when you extract any kind of static image from PowerPoint with right-click and "Save as Picture," it generates a file where the image is formatted at the dimensions you had it as in the PowerPoint slide, rather than the dimensions of the original imported image — meaning the new image may be a bit pixelated or blurry, since it's been resized. I say all of that to explain that this method avoids that problem!)
To do a real quick test of the gif file, you can just drag it into your web browser to confirm that it's animating correctly and that the dimensions and clarity are good. This gif file is ready to use in other PowerPoint files, or on the web, etc.
For Mac users
I haven't done this hands-on, but apparently for Macs it's the same basic exercise but rather than .zip you change the PowerPoint file to a .rar file — that's all! I'm not sure if the folder structure in the .rar file will be the same as I outlined above, but you should have no trouble digging around and finding the gif file in there somewhere.
Enjoy!
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.