Gifski For Mac

Although we are used to low quality animated GIFs from websites which focus on the load speed rather than good looks, there is no reason to not being able to make high-quality GIF animations if we can.

Gifski is a free and native macOS application created as an open source GUI for the GIF encoder with the same name, but without the uppercase G at the start.

Moreover, gifski is a command line tool based on the pngquant PNG lossless compression library and designed to make it possible to convert videos into high-quality GIF animations, featuring temporal dithering, smooth gradients and thousands of colors for every generated GIF.

This is being achieved by making a unique palette for each GIF frame and subsequently combining colors across frames. In the end, the resulting animated GIF image mimics the quality of the original video, with little to no difference in quality.

However, even though the animated images you can generate with the help of gifski will look amazing, there is a drawback: they will be up to 10 times larger than the videos you used as a source due to the GIF formats inherent inefficiency.

Going back to the Gifski GUI-based macOS app, it enables you to use the gifski CLI tool to convert your video to GIFs by drag and dropping them onto its window or dock icon, as well as choose it via the File > Open menu or via the right-click contextual menu.

As mentioned above, you can start converting your video into a GIF by drag and dropping the source file onto Gifski's window and, before the conversion process begins, it will ask you to choose a name, set some Finder tags if needed and select the location where you want it to save the GIF.

On this screen, you can also pick the scale, FPS, and quality of the generated GIF animation, features which might decrease its overall filesize when selecting a lower quality and FPS settings.

During the GIF creation, the Gifski application automatically displays a percentage-based progress bar to let you know how far through the conversion process it has advanced.

Despite running flawlessly during our tests, Gifski does not come with support for generating one animated GIF at a time, although this might be because of the gifski CLI tool not featuring inbuilt support for such a task.

All of the above taken into consideration, Gifski presents itself as an intuitive and straightforward video to high-quality GIF animation converter for the Mac, and it managed to prove that it is precisely that throughout our tests.