@Tarale Let me have a play. I'll get back to you.
@Tarale OK I remember what I did. After it went into the animated album, I opened the album in Photos on my laptop then did file export - pretty sure gif option was in there.
@smiffy I'm not seeing it, but I'll look properly after the whole… feeding the boy, bathing the boy, getting the boy to bed thing.
@Tarale Assuming you have iCloud sync - on desktop, View -> Albums -> Media Types -> Animated. Select photo. File -> Export -> Export GIF
@Tarale Sooooo... I don't think there's a single step to GIF on iOS; if you save to files, you get MOV, per your experience. You have to do the initial conversion on iOS, then convert to GIF on MACOS.
@smiffy I tried on mine, but I could only get a video