Making an animated GIF smaller, without flattening it

Most tools offered an animated GIF give back a single still frame, usually without mentioning it. This page does not: every frame survives, along with the timing between them and the loop. What it needs from you is one decision, and getting that decision wrong is why a GIF sometimes comes back exactly the size it went in.

Make an animated GIF smaller →

The width is the whole lever

Here is the rule, and it is worth reading twice. An animated GIF only gets smaller when you ask for a width below the one it already has.

At its own width, or anything above it, there is nothing to recalculate, so the original comes straight back — byte for byte identical, with no error and nothing to indicate that the control you moved did nothing. Measured on a 480-pixel-wide animation: asked for at 640 wide it returned unchanged; asked for at 432 it came back 61% smaller with all 24 frames intact.

So start by noticing how wide the file actually is, which the page prints under the picture, and ask for less.

Hand over the animation

Drop the file in. One at a time here, rather than a batch: the width you should ask for depends on how wide this particular animation is, and one setting across twenty of them would be right for none.

A notice appears confirming the movement will be kept. That notice is doing real work — every other output format on this site flattens an animation, and so does anything drawn onto the picture in your browser, because a canvas holds one frame. Add a caption or crop it with the editing tools and you will get a still; ask only for a smaller GIF and you will not.

Why not just convert it to something modern

You can, and where it is allowed it is the better answer: the same animation as WebP is dramatically smaller than any GIF of it, and every current browser plays one. The tool will produce that.

The reason GIF persists anyway is that it is accepted in places nothing else is — older chat clients, forum posts, email signatures, a surprising number of upload forms. A smaller GIF is worth having precisely when the thing you are sending it to will take nothing better. That is the case this page is for.

Worth knowing

Frames, timing and the loop

All three survive. The delay between frames is stored in hundredths of a second and comes back unchanged, as does the instruction to loop forever, so the result plays at the speed it was made at rather than subtly faster. It is worth checking on a long animation, because a speed change is the kind of thing nobody notices until somebody else does.

If the file is a video to begin with

Something recorded on a phone is not a GIF and should not become one at full length. Turning a clip into a GIF is the page for that, and it lets you choose which seconds to keep before anything is encoded.

Make an animated GIF smaller →