Maintaining

Testing system services

First, we need to install the app:

Archive the app.
Once you have your archive in the Organizer window, right-click it, and click Show in Finder.
Right-click again, now on the latest Gifski_DATE_.xcarchive, and click Show Package Contents.
Open /Products/Applications and move Gifski.app to your Applications directory.

Then, we need to check if our system has the latest service installed:

In your terminal, enter the command:

bash

/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs -dump | grep Gifski.app

If you see NSBundlePath = "/Applications/Gifski.app” - you're good to go.
If you don't see the line above, try updating the cache:

bash

/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs -update

Troubleshooting system services

Sometimes the service doesn't work and it's really hard to understand why without any tools. You can use a debug flag on the instance of Finder app and see the logs it dumps:

bash

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder -NSDebugServices com.sindresorhus.Gifski

Video rotation handling

Videos can have a preferredTransform that rotates the raw frames (e.g., portrait videos filmed on phones). There are two coordinate spaces:

Natural space: Raw frame dimensions (naturalSize), unrotated (e.g., 1920x1080)
Preferred space: How the user sees the video after rotation (e.g., 1080x1920 for portrait)

In this app:

UI dimensions (metadata.dimensions) are in preferred space (already rotated)
Crop rect from UI is defined in preferred space
AVAssetImageGenerator with appliesPreferredTrackTransform = true returns images in preferred space
Preview manually applies transform, so images are also in preferred space
AVComposition layer instructions operate in natural space (must transform crop back)

When cropping images: Apply crop directly (images are pre-rotated). When exporting video: Transform crop from preferred → natural space first.