Since putting our Gif·gIf·giF vs. Manual Captures page on the web, other GIF animation utilities have improved their compression schemes. We don’t take credit for the improvements—we’re just glad that the other software has improved. Why? Gif·gIf·giF is simply a screen capture utility—the other programs can be used to fine-tune the generated animations. Better compression on their part makes such fine-tuning more feasible. By focusing on screen captures, we have been able to produce a program that has simple interface and is the best software available for making GIF animations of screen activity.

Of course, we’ve got some ideas on how to produce even smaller animations and we’ll likely improve our compression just to keep things interesting...

The table on the right summarizes our current knowledge: it lists the size of the same animation, compressed by the various programs. For programs that aren’t represented, it’s reasonable to assume that they compress the animation down to around 346K (the compression you get by doing the obvious GIF compression). If you have information to contribute, please let us know.

Thanks go to Yves Piguet (the author of GifBuilder) for encouraging us to put this page up.