Crop an animated GIF
Drag a rectangle over the part worth keeping. Every frame is cut the same way.
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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.
Cropping removes the edges of an animation: black bars from a screen recording, a watermark in a corner, or everything except the one face that makes the joke. This page opens the GIF editor with cropping switched on. The original is shown with a frame to drag, and the cropped animation plays below it as you adjust.
The rectangle you draw is applied to every frame at the same position, so the animation stays steady. Move the frame by dragging inside it, resize it by its corners and edges, or nudge it with the arrow keys. The size of the result in pixels is shown under the preview, together with the number of frames and the new file weight.
Cropping is also a way to save weight without losing sharpness. A GIF cropped to the half of the picture where something happens has half the pixels and keeps full detail there, where shrinking the whole picture would blur it. For a reaction GIF, cropping tightly to the subject is nearly always the better trade.
Choosing the rectangle
Play the original through once before you crop and watch where the action goes. A subject that walks across the picture needs a rectangle wide enough for the whole path, since the crop does not follow movement. If the interesting part stays in one place, crop close to it. Leave a small margin so nothing touches the edge on any frame.
Shapes that suit where the GIF is going
A square works well for stickers, avatars and reactions. A wide strip suits a banner or the top of a document. For a chat app on a phone, a shape taller than it is wide fills more of the screen. The frame here is free, so any proportion can be drawn; watch the pixel size under the preview if you need exact numbers.
After cropping, the Size buttons scale the cropped animation further, which is how you reach a small sticker format from a large recording.
What happens to each frame
Animated GIFs often store partial frames, only the region that changed. Each frame is first built up into the complete picture a viewer would see at that moment, then cut. This is why the crop comes out clean even when the original was heavily optimised, and why the result does not show leftover fragments at its borders.
Combine with trim and speed
The same panel trims the animation in time, changes its speed and plays it backwards. All of it is applied in one pass, so the picture is encoded once and quality is not lost between steps. Crop to the subject, trim to the moment, and download.
Frequently asked questions
How do I crop a GIF to a square?
Drag the frame until the size under the preview shows equal width and height. The frame is free-form, so any shape is possible.
Does cropping reduce the quality?
The pixels inside the rectangle are kept as they are. The GIF is encoded again, which a 256 colour format tolerates well.
Can I crop out a watermark?
If it sits at an edge or in a corner, yes: draw the frame so that it is left outside. Check that you have the right to use the animation.
Does the crop follow a moving subject?
No. The rectangle is fixed for the whole animation, so make it large enough for the movement.
Is there a size limit?
Up to 300 frames, within your plan's file size limit.
Can I undo the crop?
Yes. Move the frame again or switch Crop off; your original file is not changed.
Can I crop and resize in one step?
Yes. Draw the frame, then pick 75, 50 or 33 percent under Size. The crop is cut first and the result is scaled.
Related tools
- Trim an animated GIFType where it should start and where it should end, in seconds.
- Change the speed of a GIFFrom a quarter of the original speed to four times as fast.
- Resize a GIFChange the pixel size of an animated GIF without stopping the animation.
- Compress a GIFCut the weight of an animated GIF and keep every frame moving.