gifenc

A fast and lightweight pure-JavaScript GIF encoder. Features:

• Supports many standard GIF features: image, animation, transparency
• Works in browser and Node.js (ESM + CJS)
• Highly optimized for V8 (150 1024x1024px frames takes about 2.1 seconds with workers in Chrome)
• Small library footprint (9KB before GZIP)
• Can be used across multiple web workers for multi-core devices
• Allows full control over encoding indexed bitmaps & per frame color palette
• Fast built-in color quantizer based on a port of PnnQuant.js, which is based on "Pairwise Nearest Neighbor Clustering" 1 2 3
• Fast built-in palette mapping (reducing colors to their nearest paletted index)

This library is a little lower level than something like GIF.js, but gives much better speed (i.e. often more than twice as fast) with similar visual results for many types of images. Because there is currently no dithering support, and because of the current choice of color quantizer, this encoder is probably best suited for simple flat-style vector graphics, rather than photographs or video that might need special handling across frames (e.g. temporal dithering) or better perceptual color quantizers.

Some features that could be explored in a future version:

• Alternative color quantizers
• Alternative palette mapping (such as perceptually based)
• Dithering support
• WASM-based speed optimizations
• Optimizations for FireFox
• Support Interlacing

Example

You can see a simple browser example here.

You can see a more advanced example of this encoder in action inside looom-tools.netlify.app.

Also see ./test/encode_node.js for a pure Node.js example.

Basic code example:

import { GIFEncoder, quantize, applyPalette } from 'https://unpkg.com/gifenc';

// Get your RGBA image into Uint8Array data, such as from canvas
const { data, width, height } = /* ... getImageData() ... */;

// Quantize your colors to a 256-color RGB palette palette
const palette = quantize(data, 256);

// Get an indexed bitmap by reducing each pixel to the nearest color palette
const index = applyPalette(data, palette);

// Create an encoding stream
const gif = GIFEncoder();

// Write a single frame
gif.writeFrame(index, width, height, { palette });

// Write end-of-stream character
gif.finish();

// Get the Uint8Array output of your binary GIF file
const output = gif.bytes();

API

💡 If you are new to GIF encoding, you might want to read How GIF Encoding Works to better understand the steps involved.

palette = quantize(rgba, maxColors, options = {})

Given the image contained by rgba, a flat Uint8Array or Uint8ClampedArray of per-pixel RGBA data, this method will quantize the total number of colors down to a reduced palette no greater than maxColors.

Options:

• format (string, default "rgb565") — this is the color format, either "rgb565" (default), "rgb444", or "rgba4444"
  • 565 means 5 bits red, 6 bits green, 5 bits blue (better quality, slower)
  • rgb444 is 4 bits per channel (lower quality, faster)
  • rgba4444 is the same as above but with alpha support
  • if you choose rgba4444, the resulting color table will include alpha channel
• oneBitAlpha (boolean|number, default false) — if alpha format is selected, this will go through all quantized RGBA colors and set their alpha to either 0x00 if the alpha is less than or equal to 127, otherwise it will be set to 0xFF. You can specify a number here instead of a boolean to use a specific 1-bit alpha threshold
• clearAlpha (boolean, default true) — if alpha format is selected and the quantized color is below clearAlphaThreshold, it will be replaced with clearAlphaColor (i.e. RGB colors with 0 opacity will be replaced with pure black)
• clearAlphaThreshold (number, default 0) — if alpha and clearAlpha is enabled, and a quantized pixel has an alpha below or equal to this value, its RGB values will be set to clearAlphaColor
• clearAlphaColor (number, default 0x00) — if alpha and clearAlpha is enabled and a quantized pixel is being cleared, this is the color its RGB cahnnels will be cleared to (typically you will choose 0x00 or 0xff)

The return value palette is an array of arrays, and no greater than maxColors in length. Each array in the palette is either RGB or RGBA (depending on pixel format) such as [ r, g, b ] or [ r, g, b, a ] in bytes.

index = applyPalette(rgba, palette, format = "rgb565")

This will determine the color index for each pixel in the rgba image. The pixel input is the same as the above function: to a flat Uint8Array or Uint8ClampedArray of per-pixel RGBA data.

The method will step through each pixel and determine it's closest pixel in the color table (in euclidean RGB(A) space), and replace the pixel with an index value in the range 0..255. The return value index is a Uint8Array with a length equal to rgba.length / 4 (i.e. 1 byte per pixel).

The method uses palette, which is an array of arrays such as received from the quantize method, and may be in RGB or RGBA depending on your desired format.

const palette = [
  [0, 255, 10],
  [50, 20, 100],
  // ...
];

The format is the same as in quantize, and you can choose between opaque (RGB) and semi-transparent (RGBA) formats. You'll likely want to choose the same format you used to quantize your image.

gif = GIFEncoder(opts = {})

Creates a new GIF stream with the given options (for basic usage, you can ignore these).

• auto (boolean, default true) — in "auto" mode, the header and first-frame metadata (global palette) will be written upon writing the first frame. If set to false, you will be responsible for first writing a GIF header, then writing frames with { first } boolean specified.
• initialCapacity (number, default 4096) — the number of bytes to initially set the internal buffer to, it will grow as bytes are written to the stream

Once created:

gif.writeFrame(index, width, height, opts = {})

Writes a single frame into the GIF stream, with index (indexed Uint8Array bitmap image), a size, and optional per-frame options:

• palette (color table array) — the color table for this frame, which is required for the first frame (i.e. global color table) but optional for subsequent frames. If not specified, the frame will use the first (global) color table in the stream.
• first (boolean, default false) — in non-auto mode, set this to true when encoding the first frame in an image or sequence, and it will encode the Logical Screen Descriptor and a Global Color Table. This option is ignored in auto mode.
• transparent (boolean, default false) — enable 1-bit transparency for this frame
• transparentIndex (number, default 0) — if transparency is enabled, the color at the specified palette index will be treated as fully transparent for this frame
• delay (number, default 0) — the frame delay in milliseconds
• repeat (number, default 0) — repeat count, set to -1 for 'once', 0 for 'forever', and any other positive integer for the number of repetitions
• dispose (number, default -1) — advanced GIF dispose flag override, -1 is 'use default'

gif.finish()

Writes the GIF end-of-stream character, required after writing all frames for the image to encode correctly.

gif.bytes()

Gets a slice of the Uint8Array bytes that is underlying this GIF stream. (Note: this incurs a copy)

gif.bytesView()

Gets a direct typed array buffer view into the Uint8Array bytes underlying this GIF stream. (Note: no copy involved, but best to use this carefully).

gif.writeHeader()

Writes a GIF header into the stream, only necessary if you have specified { auto: false } in the GIFEncoder options.

gif.reset()

Resets this GIF stream by simply setting its internal stream cursor (index) to zero, so that subsequent writes will replace the previous data in the underlying buffer.

gif.buffer

A property on the GIF stream that returns the currently backed ArrayBuffer, note this reference may change as the buffer grows in size.

gif.stream

A property on the GIF stream that returns an internal API that holds an expandable buffer and allows writing single or multiple bytes.

// write a single byte to stream
gif.stream.writeByte(0xff);
// write a chunk of bytes to the stream
gif.stream.writeBytes(myTypedArray, offset, byteLength);

index = nearestColorIndex(palette, pixel)

For the given pixel as [r,g,b] or [r,g,b,a] (depending on your pixel format), determines the index (0...N) of the nearest color in your palette array of colors in the same RGB(A) format.

[index, distance] = nearestColorIndexWithDistance(palette, pixel)

Same as above, but returns a tuple of index and distance (euclidean distance squared).

Web Workers

For the best speed, you should use workers to split this work across multiple threads. Compare these encoding speeds with 150 frames of 1024x1024px GIF in Chrome:

• Main thread only: ~5 seconds
• Split across 4 workers: ~2 seconds

This library will run fine in a worker with ES support, but there is currently no built-in worker API, and it's up to the developer to implement their own worker architecture and handle bundling.

The simplest architecture, and the one used in my Looom exporter, is to:

• Send the RGBA pixel data of each frame to one worker amongst a pool of multiple workers
• In the worker, do quantization, apply palette, and then use GIFEncoder({ auto: false }) to write a 'chunk' of GIF without a header or end-of-stream
• Send the encoded bytes view back to the main thread, which will store the chunk into a linear array
• Once all streams have been encoded and their workers responded with encoded chunks, you can write all frames sequentially into a single GIF stream

There is an example of this in ./test/encode_web_workers.html which uses ./test/worker.js. Future versions of this library might include a pre-bundled worker API built-in for easier use.

How GIF Encoding Works

There are generally 3 steps involved, but some applications might be able to skip these or choose a different algorithm for one of the steps, so this library gives you control over each step.

For each frame in your animation (or, just a single frame for still images):

1. You'll first need to convert RGB(A) pixels from your source graphic/photograph into a reduced color table (palette) of 256 or less RGB colors. The act of reducing thousands of colors into 256 unique colors that still produce good quality results is known as quantization.
2. Then, you'll need to turn your RGB(A) pixels into an indexed bitmap, basically going through each pixel and finding the nearest index into the color table for that pixel, based on our reduced palette. In gifenc, we call this applying a palette. The result of this is a bitmap image where each pixel is an index integer in the range 0..255 that points to a color in your palette.
3. Now, we can encode this single frame by writing the indexed bitmap and local palette. This will compress the pixel data with GIF/LZW encoding, and add it to the GIF stream.

There's some situations where you might need to change the way you approach these steps. For example, if you decide to use a single global 256-color palette for a whole animation, you might only need to quantize once, and then applyPalette to each frame by reducing to the same global palette. In some other cases, you might choose to add prequantization or postquantization to speed up and improve the quantization results, or perhaps skip steps #2 and #3 if you already have indexed images. Or, you might choose to use dithering, or perhaps another quantizer entirely.

Running from Source

Git clone this repo, then:

npm install

To run the node test:

node test/encode_node.js

And check test/output/ folder for the result. Or to benchmark with node:

# re-build from source
npm run dist:cjs

# run benchmark
node test/bench_node.js

Benchmarking/profiling is probably easier with Chrome, and this imports the source directly rather than built version:

npm run serve

Now navigate to http://localhost:5000/test/bench_web.html.

Similarly, while serving you can

More to Come

This library is still a WIP, feel free to open an issue to discuss some things.

Credits

The code here has been forked/inspired/remixed from these libraries:

• Gif.js
• gif-codec
• PnnQuant.js

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md for details.