Several precursors such as zinc nitrite, zinc chloride, zinc acetate and zinc sulfate were used to synthesize ZIF-8. These zeolitic imidazolate frameworks synthesized from different zinc precursors under different reaction conditions were characterized by XRD, SEM and FTIR. The synthesis of ZIF-8 was not sensitive to zinc precursor and reaction parameter. Subsequently, we used ZIF-8 to modify the γ-Al2O3 porous ceramic membrane, expecting improvement of separation performance in the γ-Al2O3 porous ceramic membrane. The experimental results indicated that the permselectivity of hydrogen/nitrogen was enhanced in the γ-Al2O3 porous ceramic membrane modified with ZIF-8, although the gas permeance through the modified membrane slightly decreased. In addition, the modified γ-Al2O3 porous ceramic membrane was used to separate the binary systems containing ethanol-water and acrylic acid-water. The separation factor of ethanol to water is 3.1, while it is 2.6 as for acrylic acid-water. Furthermore, the permeance in the former is about five times than that of the latter.