Gifski is a free open-source video-to-gif converter tool created by the same developer who gave us ImageOptim. It uses pngquant’s (a CLI utility for lossless PNG image compression) select features to efficiently create gif animations containing thousands of colours per frame.
You can compile Gifski as a library and use it in other applications. You have to ask the developer first if you want to use it in a closed-source app.
Features in Gifski
- Free software.
- Open-source with source code available on GitHub.
- Available for GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac.
- Can be compiled as a library to use in other applications.
- Supports drag-and-drop.
How to Install and Use Gifski in Linux
FFmpeg is a requirement for converting videos to PNG frames, you can install it using your Linux distribution package manager.
$ sudo apt install ffmpeg
Once that is installed, launch your terminal app and run:
$ ffmpeg -i video.mp4 frame%04d.png
In this command, “video.mp4” signifies the filename and creates files “frame0001.png“, “frame0002.png“, “frame0003.png“, etc. from it as given by %04d which signifies the number of frames.
If you don’t want to type the paths you can drag and drop files into the terminal window.
Now, to build the GIF from the frames enter.
$ gifski -o file.gif frame*.png
Here, “file.gif” signifies the filename that will be created from the PNG files with “frame” in their name.
For more options, enter gifski -h.
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Gifski’s workflow will be a lot better if it had a GUI for Linux users. Sadly, only Mac users can enjoy that feature at the moment. Maybe it’s for the best.
Get in the comments box and tell us what you think about Gifski.
