# Flipboard/FLAnimatedImage

Performant animated GIF engine for iOS

Repository: https://github.com/Flipboard/FLAnimatedImage
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/flanimatedimage
Language: Objective-C
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2024-03-21T10:45:04+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 23/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4489, "days_push": 895, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 7949, forks 1205 (observed 2026-08-28T04:10:10.183863+00:00)

## What it is
FLAnimatedImage is a performant animated GIF engine for iOS that plays GIFs with desktop-browser-like speed while handling variable frame delays and memory pressure gracefully. It provides a drop-in FLAnimatedImageView replacement for UIImageView that requires no central cache or state management.

## Use cases
- play animated gifs in an ios app
- display multiple gifs simultaneously without blocking the ui
- replace uiimageview with a view that supports gif animation
- handle gifs with variable frame delays correctly
- avoid memory issues when showing many animated images
- match browser-like gif playback speed on iphone and ipad

## When to choose
- your ios app needs to display animated GIFs with high performance
- you want a simple drop-in UIImageView replacement for GIF support
- you need graceful behavior under memory pressure with many GIFs
- you want battle-tested code that powers GIFs in a major production app

## When to avoid
- you are building for Android or another non-Apple platform
- you need animated image formats beyond GIF such as APNG or WebP
- you are starting a new project and prefer a Swift-native solution
- you need GIF encoding or creation rather than playback

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: image-processing, ui-components
- domain: mobile-development, media, graphics
- platform: -
- tags: animated-gif, gif-player, objective-c, uikit, cocoapods, image-view, animation, memory-efficient, ios, mobile, swift

## Member repositories
- Flipboard/FLAnimatedImage (main) score 23

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:10.183863+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:33:12.464539+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/Flipboard/FLAnimatedImage (fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:10.183863+00:00, sha a5841eb414c7)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.