Gifsicle (an acronym of the gif and popsicle words) is an open source, free and powerful command-line software that can be used to easily and quickly create, edit, manipulate and collect information from GIF animations and static images. It comprises of three programs, one for viewing GIFs (gifview), a second one to compare two GIF images (gifdiff) and a third one for editing GIF images (gifsicle).

With Gifsicle, making animated GIF images is easy. Key features include a batch mode for converting GIF images in place, prints detailed information about GIF files, such as comments, allows you to control interlacing, looping, comments and transparency of GIFs, as well as to generate standard GIFs and unoptimize GIF animations, making them easier to edit.

In addition the application is capable of shrinking colormaps, allows users to implement the Web-safe palette or any other colormap in GIF images, removes superfluous colors and optimizes GIF animations, reducing the size of the animated GIF files.

Being a CLI tool, each of the included commands comes with its own command-line options, which can be viewed at a glance by adding the ‘--help’ string at the end of the respective command.

Uses can use the gifview command to animate multiframe GIFs, set the window geometry and title, set a custom application resource name, set a custom display for view the GIF image, display GIF images in a specific window or in new child of existing window, use a private colormap, use a background color for transparent pixels, set the minimum and fallback frame delay, as well as to ignore keystrokes and buttons.

On the other hand the gifdiff command includes only two options, the ability to do not report detailed differences, as well as the ability to ignore differences in redundant frames. The gifsicle command also includes a wide variety of options, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘gifsicle --help’ command in a terminal emulator.