Source and documentation
gifsicle-1.92.tar.gz(575199 bytes)
On Github

Prebuilt binaries
DebianLinux package (maintained by Gürkan Sengün)
FreeBSD port (maintained by Sylvio Amorim)
NetBSDpackage (maintained by Ben Wong)
Mac OS X HomeBrew port
MacPorts package (may be out of date)
DOS port (maintained by Robert Riebisch)
Windows ports (maintained by Jernej Simončič)

Translations
French (by Nicolas Chevallier)

What is this?

Gifsicle is a command-line tool for creating, editing, and gettinginformation about GIF images and animations. Making a GIF animation withgifsicle is easy:

gifsicle --delay=10 --loop *.gif > anim.gif

gifsicle anim.gif '#0' > firstframe.gif

gifsicle -b anim.gif --replace '#0' new.gif

Some more gifsicle features:

• Batch mode for changing GIFs in place.
• Prints detailed information about GIFs, includingcomments.
• Control over interlacing, comments, looping,transparency...
• Creates well-behaved GIFs: removes redundant colors, only useslocal color tables if it absolutely has to (local color tables waste spaceand can cause viewing artifacts), etc.
• It can shrink colormaps and change images to use theWeb-safe palette (or any colormap you choose).
• Optimize your animations! This stores only the changedportion of each frame, and can radically shrink your GIFs. You can also usetransparency to make them even smaller. Gifsicle’s optimizer is prettypowerful, and usually reduces animations to within a couple bytes of thebest commercial optimizers.
• Unoptimizing animations, which makes them easier to edit.
• A dumb name.

Two other programs are included with gifsicle: gifview is alightweight animated-GIF viewer which can show animations as slideshows orin real time, and gifdiff compares two GIFs for identical visualappearance.

Gifsicle is freely available. All you’ll need is an ANSI Ccompiler. I welcome changes, bug reports, complaints, etc.: mail me atekohler@gmail.com!

Gifsicle questions

Let the person who isn’t actually buying anything but israther downloading something for free, beware.

Q: How do you pronounce “gifsicle”?
A: “Yo’ mama.”

Q: What about patents?
A: The GIF image format had some patent problems in the past,but according to the Free SoftwareFoundation, “The Software Freedom Law Center says that after 1 October2006, there will be no significant patent claims interfering withemployment of the GIF format.” [reference]

Other GIF tools

Whirlgif (an older version) mergessingle GIFs into animations, but cannot extract frames, edit animations, oruse animations as input files. It either uses local color tables, or itchanges input colors by only using colors from the first GIF frame. It alsocannot handle complicated input transparency or more than 256 colors total.Gifsicle now uses its adaptive tree method for LZW encoding (thanks!) whichmakes it basically as fast as Whirlgif.

GIFMerge is based onan earlier program called txtmerge. Like Whirlgif, it cannot extract framesor edit animations. It also cannot optimize animations. Resultinganimations always have local color tables. Doesn’t deal with inputtransparency.

Giftool does batch mode, comments, interlacing, and information,but doesn’t handle animations.

Of course, there are hundredsof programs available for Macs and Windows boxes!

There’s at least one GIF optimizer available via the Web. Submit aGIF URL to OptiView, and it spitsout several impressively optimized versions for you to select from.As of mid-1998, gifsicle -O2 usually did about as well as GIF Wizard,OptiView’s predecessor.

Testimonials

“I would even go so far as to say that it is stunning.”

“[Gifsicle is] 10x faster than our previous converter.... The images are significantly smaller, too.”

“I just downloaded Gifsicle, and would like to make two smallpoints:

1. It is vastly better than GIFMerge and Whirlgif, in every way Icould think of. Not least importantly, it reduced the GIF animations on myweb site from 19MB total down to 11MB, which suddenly made my site mucheasier to navigate.
2. Don’t be so hard on poor Anne, whoever she is; Gifsicleisn’t such a bad name (at least it’smemorable.)”

“YESYESYESYESYES I HAVE A DENTIST APPOINT MENT THAT DAY!!!

IT’S A VERY IMPORTANT DENTISST APOINTMENT, AS THEY ARE FILLINGA CAVITY FROM WHICH THE LAST FILLING HAD FALLEN OUT, AND IT ISGETTING SENSITIVE!!!

CAN’T MISS THAT DENTIST APPPOINTMENT!!! CAN’T RESCHEDULEIT, AS THEY ARE VERY BUSY AT THE DENTIST PLACE!!!!!!!!!

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS”

“God bless you and gifsicle! It is the answer to my prayers andyearnings. Linux go bragh.”

Testimonials Européens

“...Gifsicle, manejador de gifs...”

Testimonialae Africanae

“Ja-nee swaer. Ek het nog steeds nie die ding gedownload nie,maar dit lyk vir my sonder twyfel nat-kak.”

Etienne Posthumus’s “rough” translation: “Well oldboy. I haven’t downloaded it yet, but it looks hot-shit to me without adoubt.”
An independent translation: “Sure bro. Istill haven’t downloaded the thing yet, but it looks to me without a doubtlike wet shit.”