You may have wondered, though, how you could break one apart into its individual frames (or even just view the frames separately if there happened to be a detail that you’d like to focus on). Your Mac actually has a built-in way to do that using Preview, which is pretty darned awesome.
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So to check it out, first find the GIF you’d like to use on the Web. When you do, right- or Control-click it and pick either “Save Image As” or “Save Image to the Desktop.”
This is using Safari, but Firefox and Chrome have similar commands available when you right-click an image.
Then find the file you’ve just saved and double-click it to open it into Preview. If for some reason your GIF is opening into another program, you can right-click it, choose “Open With,” and pick Preview from the list. Anyway, when you've got it open, you should see a series of thumbnails down the left-hand side of the window.
It's like you can see the moment that the bothers stop being given.
Press Option-Command-2 (which is the shortcut for View> Thumbnails) if you don't see them, or select the proper option from the toolbar’s “View” drop-down.
And that’s it! Each of those thumbnails represents a frame of the animated GIF, so you can drag a frame out to the Desktop to create a separate file of it…
…or you can right-click one of the thumbnails and pick “Export As” if you wanna make sure you’ve got it in a specific format.
Neat! Now you can be sure to save all of your favorite frames from those cat GIFs you love so much. C'mon, now, I know that ain't just me. I think the Internet is practically powered by images of cats.
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