GIFs

2019-11-11 — 2026-08-22

quality 5.5

In Which 4,500,000 Files Are Extracted From the GeoCities Archive, FFMPEG Command Strings Are Deployed for Conversion, and the 29-Year-Old Gifsicle Tool Is Noted Alongside Modern Haskell-Built Editors.

computers are awful
photon choreography
premature optimization
standards
Figure 1

The internet’s primordial animation format. An art form of restraint and limitation.

1 GIF libraries

  • GifCities

    Mining the Internet Archive’s GeoCities Closing Crawl collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs. In the original GifCities, we used the words in the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text” search engine. In the 2025 update of GifCities, we used AI tools to create a semantic-based search index to supplement the original search index to improve discoverability.

2 FFMPEG is our friend

GIF is one of the output formats of FFMPEG.

2.1 Convert GIF to movie

Google advises on converting animated GIFs to movies:

ffmpeg -i input.gif -b:v 0 -crf 25 output.mp4

The evil martians version is lengthier:

ffmpeg -i input.gif -map_metadata -1 -c:a libfdk_aac -c:v libx264 -cfr 24 -preset veryslow -profile:v mail -px_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" image.h264.mp4

2.2 Convert movie to GIF

10fps, low resolution, seconds 5-8:

ffmpeg -i movie.mp4 -ss 5 -to 8 -vf scale=480:-1 -r 10 movie.gif

2.3 Wrappers

Some scripts make it easier to remember the dump CLI options.

3 FFMPEG alternatives

4 Editing a movie for GIF

macOS: sindresorhus/Gifski: 🌈 Convert videos to high-quality GIFs on your Mac

For more fine control, try proper video editing.

5 Examples