Gifski is intended to create animated GIFs from videos. It works like a video converter, which transcodes to a different format, although the result is not another video file, but an animated picture. The main advantage of doing this is that a GIF file can be more easily embedded into a web page and does not require additional software to be installed.
Actually, the merit of Gifski’s developers is that they have contributed with a graphical user interface for an already existing GIF encoder. In this respect, the program has a minimalistic interface, with just a few buttons, which supports loading a video by a simple drag-and-drop operation.
The program lets you configure some output options. So, it is possible to adjust output dimensions to exactly the desired numbers. Besides, it lets you set the number of frames per second as well as the quality.
What under the hood is a powerful lossless compression library, called pngquant, which guarantees videos are converted to GIF without any noticeable quality loss. In this respect, it is great that is uses temporal dithering and smooth gradients along with a wide color palette. Unfortunately, there is a drawback: unless you adjust the output numbers to minimize size, quality and the number of fps, the resulting GIF will be much heavier than the original video. Likewise, it is a shame that it does not let you extract just a segment of the source footage.
All in all, Gifski provides users with a more convenient and practical way to convert video to animated GIF than doing so from the command line. Fortunately, the tool is opensource and free to use by all.
v2.2 [Nov 4, 2019]
- Gifski now requires macOS 11. See the Gifski website for the last macOS 10.15 compatible version.
- The conversion completed notification now plays a sound. You can turn this off in “System Preferences › Notifications & Focus › Gifski”.
