Compress a GIF
Cut the weight of an animated GIF and keep every frame moving.
- Private by defaultDeleted within an hour
- Super FastProcess in seconds
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How it works
Add your images
Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection.
Pick a quality or a target size
Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need.
Download
Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP.
GIF is the heaviest way there is to store moving pictures. Each frame is saved as a complete image of up to 256 colours, and nothing is shared between one frame and the next the way a video codec shares it. That is why five seconds of animation at 480 pixels wide can weigh 8 MB while a video of the same clip is a few hundred kilobytes.
This page keeps the file a GIF and makes it lighter. It starts at quality 75, which stores each frame with 192 colours instead of 256, and keeps the whole animation: every frame, the timing and the loop. Lower the slider for fewer colours, or open Resize and make the frames smaller, which has the larger effect.
Be realistic about colour reduction alone: on most clips it saves between a tenth and a third. If the GIF has to shrink by half or more, the dimensions have to come down or the format has to change. Uploads are encrypted, the GIF is processed on our own servers, and it is deleted within one hour.
Three levers, from strongest to weakest
Dimensions come first. Halve the width and the height and every frame holds a quarter of the pixels, so the file falls to roughly a quarter. A GIF made from a screen recording at 1280 pixels wide and shown in a chat window at 400 is carrying nine times the data anyone will see.
Colours come second. The quality slider maps straight onto the palette: 100 keeps 256 colours, 75 keeps 192, 50 keeps 128 and 25 keeps 64. Screen recordings, cartoons and pixel art rarely need more than 64. Film clips and anything with smooth gradients show banding below about 128.
The third lever is leaving GIF behind. Choose WebP in the Format menu and the same animation, with all its frames, is typically less than half the size, because WebP compresses the differences between frames. Every current browser plays it.
What this tool does not do
It does not remove frames, lower the frame rate or trim the clip. Those are the other classic ways to shrink a GIF, and they belong in the program that made it: export at 12 or 15 frames per second instead of 30, or cut the clip to the part that matters, and then compress the result here.
There are limits on what can be processed. An animation may have up to 300 frames, and a file up to 20 MB without an account or 200 MB with Pro. Cropping, rotating, flipping or adding a watermark works on a single frame, so those return a still picture, with a warning that the animation was dropped.
Match the GIF to where it is going
In a chat or a forum, the upload limit is what counts. Look it up, switch to Target size and enter it; the search lowers the colours first and the dimensions after, and tells you what it reached. In an email, keep the GIF under 1 MB and make sure the first frame makes sense alone, because some desktop mail programs show only that frame. On your own website a GIF is rarely the right answer: an animated WebP or a short muted video loads faster and looks better.
Frequently asked questions
Does the GIF stay animated after compression?
Yes. Compressing and plain resizing keep every frame and the timing. Only edits that reshape the picture, such as a crop or a rotation, reduce it to its first frame.
How many colours does a GIF need?
Fewer than most have. Interface recordings and flat animation look the same at 64. Photographic clips are comfortable at 128 to 192. The full 256 only matters for smooth gradients.
Can I compress a GIF to an exact size, such as 5 MB?
Yes. Use Target size and type the limit. The colours are reduced first, and if that is not enough the frames are scaled down until the file fits.
Why did my GIF hardly get smaller?
It was probably saved with a small palette already. Reduce the dimensions instead, or convert it to WebP, where the saving does not depend on the palette.
Is a still GIF handled too?
Yes, though for a still picture PNG does everything GIF does, with better transparency and usually a smaller file. Choose PNG in the Format menu.
What is the longest animation I can upload?
300 frames. At 15 frames per second that is twenty seconds. Longer clips should be cut first, or saved as video, which suits them better anyway.