homebrewing gifsicle

gifsicle is a commandline tool for animating gifs. I’ve blogged about it before, and created a simple gui for it to grab animated gifs from a movie. I checked the site for updates today and noticed that there is now a Mac OS X homebrew package.

For folk like myself who do not spend much time on the commandline this is a simpler way to install (as compared to downloading the source and compiling). You do need to install homebrew but you do that by copying a line of code from the homebrew site and pasting it into the terminal. Wait a while as a lot of text scrolls by and it is done.

you can then install gifsicle by typing:

brew install  gifsicle and pressing return.

You are then ready to convert a bunch of gif files into an animated gif.

A couple of examples:

Using a set of gifs created from these photos (and a few more), first set converted to B & W in FireWorks:

gifsicle –resize-width 500 –delay=60 –loop *.gif > eagle.gif

Using a set of coloured gifs exportedfrom the jpegs:

gifsicle –resize-width 500 –delay=60 –loop –colors 256 *.gif > eagle256.gif

If you are a ds106er who likes playing with animating gifs, gifsicle is a very useful addition to your toolkit.

 

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