amilajack/gifski

Gifski is a macOS app that converts video clips into animated GIFs with noticeably higher visual quality than most tools produce. Instead of the muddy, limited-color GIFs you typically see, it can generate animations with thousands of colors per frame and frame rates up to 50 FPS, the kind of quality that matters when you're showing off design work on a portfolio site or sharing a product demo. Under the hood, it relies on a specialized GIF encoder (called gifski) that uses techniques borrowed from image optimization tools, specifically, it analyzes multiple frames together to build a shared color palette and applies temporal dithering to smooth out transitions. In plain terms, rather than processing each frame in isolation, it looks at the whole video to make smarter decisions about color and quality. You can also dial the quality down with a slider if you need a smaller file. The app is built for Mac users who regularly need to turn video into GIFs, designers sharing work on Dribbble, product folks creating demo clips for Slack or documentation, or anyone capturing screen recordings they want to share as lightweight animations. It handles common video formats like MP4 and MOV (using H264, HEVC, or ProRes codecs) and integrates directly into macOS's Share menu and Services menu, so you can convert a screen recording without even opening the app separately. A few nice touches: it supports a "bounce" playback mode that plays the GIF forward then backward (similar to iOS Live Photo effects), and you can adjust dimensions, speed, frame rate, quality, and looping. One limitation worth noting, it processes one conversion at a time, though there's a workaround involving opening multiple app instances from the terminal. The project is maintained by Sindre Sorhus and Kornel Lesiński and is available on the Mac App Store, requiring macOS 11 or later.