Gifcurry, create your own animated GIFs from a video easily

In the next article we are going to take a look at Gifcurry. This is one application with which we can go from video to gif with a simple user interface and some very useful features. This program is free and open source software.

Modern web browsers can reproduce Animated gifs without any problem. We can host these on our own server or on a free image sharing site like Imgur. These types of images provide a faster loading experience than YouTube videos or an HTML5 embed. They are a good option to show specific functionalities in tutorials.

There are quite a few ways to create animated Gifs from video in Gnu / Linux, like export to gif from Kdenlive, Qgifer or we could always use ffmpeg directly on the command line. Use gifcurry it is simpler than any of the previously named (at least as I see it). It is as simple as running it, choosing a video to convert to a GIF, setting the start time and the desired duration. Next, we just have to press the Create button and that's it.

Gifcurry general features

This program uses ffmpeg y imageagic to process the video and convert it to GIF. For all types of users, the program offers us a command line interface (CLI) and a graphical user interface (GUI). In this post I will only show how to run the GUI.

In addition to being able to create an animated GIF from a video, it will also give us the option to add text. For this, any font that you have installed in your operating system will be used. It is the perfect application if you are a lover of memes or want to subtitle a clip.

Among the available options, you can set the width of the image in pixels, the exact duration in seconds and select a quality size. Unfortunately, we will not have advanced options to control frame rate, looping behavior, or color palette. Without these variables it becomes somewhat difficult to adjust the quality settings. The higher the quality, the larger the GIF size..

The application shows a preview of the first and last frame. Naturally, the animated GIF you make will not be as smooth as the source video you use, but depending on the configuration you choose, it can be quite decent.

Another good option that we will have at our disposal is to be able to upload the final result to Imgur o Giphy.

In addition to the advanced options, the only feature that this application may be missing, which would make it go from useful to essential, is the option to crop.

Create a Gifcurry GIF

To create an animated GIF, we will first choose a video using the input video button. How the application is powered by ffmpeg works for virtually any video format that can be thrown at it.

Next, we will have to choose the size (in px) that we want to use in our animated image and the quality level. The higher the quality, the larger the size of the image file, this is something that must be taken into account.

The most probable (and logical) thing is that we do not want to use the entire video, so we will have to indicate the moment of time (in seconds) to indicate where the animation begins and we will write a duration (in seconds) to decide when it ends. We can use the frame previews that the application shows to verify that we are cutting where we are interested. The application will allow us to move the first and last frames back and forth.

Download Gifcurry

To use this program, we will not have a traditional installer for GifCurry. But don't worry, it's pretty easy to run. As long as you have so much ffmpeg as magic image installed in your operating system.

To begin we will have to download the latest version of Gifcurry from its home page. Github.

The next step would be to extract the file using Nautilus.

To finish we will only have to run the binary 'gifcurry_gui' inside the folder 'bin'. And with this, the program will be shown on our desktop.

If you are one of those who prefer the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T), you can perform all the previous steps by opening one and typing:

wget https://github.com/lettier/gifcurry/releases/download/2.1.0.0/gifcurry-linux-2.1.0.0.tar.gz
tar xvfz gifcurry-linux*.tar.gz
cd gifcurry-linux*/bin
./gifcurry_gui