How to Make Gifs in Mac OS X

I’d wanted an easy way to make an animated Gif. Initially searching gave me all web apps which had unfortunate size restrictions and produced low quality gifs.

Luckily, I found a command line tool called Gifsicle.

You can install it with Homebrew.

brew install gifsicle

I had a folder named cas9_png full of images I’d wanted to turn into a gif. They were .png files so I converted them into .gif files using sips. I then combined all the .gif files into a single animated gif using Gifsicle.

cd cas9_png
mkdir cas9_gif
sips -s format gif *.png --out cas9_gif
cd cas9_gif
gifsicle --loop --colors 256 *.gif>cas9.gif

Viola! My gif of a Cas9 protein molecule!