Gifski is a free, open-source Mac app by Sindre Sorhus that converts video files into high-quality animated GIFs using a perceptual dithering algorithm that preserves far more colour fidelity than most GIF tools can manage.
What is Gifski?
Gifski is a native macOS application wrapping the acclaimed gifski encoder — widely regarded as the best-quality GIF encoder available — in a clean, drag-and-drop interface. Drop a MOV, MP4, or any QuickTime-compatible clip onto the window, tweak a handful of sliders, and walk away with a GIF that looks closer to the original video than you'd think the format allows. The app is free to download from the Mac App Store and the project is fully open-source on GitHub.
Under the hood, the encoder uses a sophisticated palette-selection pass on every individual frame rather than forcing a single global 256-colour palette across the entire clip. The difference is visible immediately: gradients stay smooth, skin tones don't posterise, and subtle motion blur survives the conversion intact.
What does Gifski do best?
Gifski produces the most visually faithful GIFs I've ever seen from a Mac app — that's its superpower and its entire reason to exist. Where tools like GIMP's GIF export, FFmpeg's default palette settings, or even Photoshop's legacy Save for Web dialog produce muddy, banded results on any footage with gradients or camera movement, Gifski's output is genuinely sharp.
The controls are deliberately minimal: frame rate, output width, and quality (which maps to bit-depth aggressiveness). There's no timeline editor, no text overlay tool, no sticker pack. That restraint is the right call. If you need to trim or crop before exporting, do it in QuickTime Player or iMovie first — Gifski is the last step, not the editing suite.
- Per-frame palette quantisation — far less banding than single-palette encoders
- Drag-and-drop simplicity — no install of FFmpeg or command-line knowledge required
- Native Apple Silicon — encodes fast on M-series Macs, with no Rosetta overhead
- Lossless source handling — works directly with ProRes, HEVC, and H.264 clips
- Live preview — watch the GIF render in real time before saving
Is Gifski free?
Yes — Gifski is completely free to download and use with no watermarks, no feature paywalls, and no subscription. It is open-source software maintained by Sindre Sorhus, a prolific indie Mac and iOS developer known for quality-first utilities. The source code is available on GitHub if you want to inspect or contribute to it.
Who should use Gifski?
Gifski is ideal for designers, developers, and content creators who regularly share short motion clips in contexts where video embeds are unwieldy — GitHub READMEs, Notion pages, Slack threads, Jira tickets, or email. If you've ever cringed at a blocky, colour-shifted GIF of a UI animation you recorded and thought "there has to be something better", Gifski is that something.
It's less suited to users who need heavy editing — trimming to an exact frame, adding captions, looping specific sections, or batch-converting a folder of files. For that kind of workflow, a tool like Rottenwood or a scripted FFmpeg pipeline makes more sense. Gifski is a precision finisher, not a production pipeline.
What are the best Gifski alternatives?
The closest Mac alternatives are GIPHY Capture (records directly from screen, simpler but noticeably lower output quality), Rottenwood (adds basic trimming and caption tools but uses a standard palette encoder), and the command-line FFmpeg + palettegen combo (powerful, but requires terminal fluency and still doesn't match Gifski's perceptual quality by default).
For pure screen recording to GIF, Kap — also by Sindre Sorhus — is the better starting point: it records a region of your screen and can export directly to GIF via its own Gifski-powered plugin. Use Kap when you're capturing UI, and Gifski when you're converting existing video files you shot with a camera or export from Final Cut.
How does Gifski compare to Photoshop's GIF export?
Photoshop's Save for Web GIF encoder uses an adaptive palette but applies it globally across all frames — a 30-frame clip gets one shared 256-colour map, which is why motion-heavy footage turns blotchy. Gifski recalculates the palette per frame, yielding visibly smoother colour transitions at comparable file sizes. For anything more complex than a simple logo animation, Gifski wins on output quality; Photoshop wins if you need frame-level control over timing or transparency masks.
