Compress an animated GIF to a smaller file

Drop GIF files here

or click to choose — animated or still, one or many, no size limit

Mode

Make animated GIFs smaller without leaving your browser. See a Light, Recommended and Strong version playing next to each other with their sizes, and keep the one that still looks right — or set a limit such as 256 KB for a Discord emoji and let the tool find the gentlest settings that fit. It runs Gifsicle, the same open-source optimiser many GIF sites use, on your own device: no upload, no file size cap, no watermark.

Nothing is uploaded — the file stays on your device
No file size limit
No sign-up, no watermark
Free, with no paid tier holding anything back

How to compress a GIF

Drop one or more GIF files into the box above, or click it to choose them.
In Compare 3 levels, wait a moment while Light, Recommended and Strong versions are made. All three play side by side, each with its new size.
Download the one that still looks right. With several GIFs, pick a version for each and download them together as a ZIP.
Have a hard limit to meet instead? Switch to Fit a size limit, choose a preset or type a size in KB, and the tool searches for the gentlest settings that fit.

Your original file is never changed. Every version is a new file, named after the original with the level added (party-recommended.gif), so you can keep both.

What the three levels do

A GIF gets smaller in four ways, and they cost different things. The levels combine them from least to most visible:

Level	Settings	What you might notice
Light	Frame re-optimisation, lossy 30, all colours kept	Usually nothing
Recommended	Lossy 80, palette reduced to 128 colours	Slight banding in smooth gradients
Strong	Lossy 140, 64 colours, width scaled to 75%	Visible grain and a smaller picture

Re-optimisation is free: it stores only the part of each frame that changed since the previous one and packs the data more tightly, without touching a single pixel. Lossy compression lets the encoder use a pixel that is almost the right colour when that means it can repeat a pattern it has already stored. Fewer colours means fewer distinct values to encode. And smaller dimensions cut the pixel count directly — the most powerful step of all, because scaling a GIF to half its width leaves a quarter of the pixels.

The levels behave very differently depending on the GIF. A screen recording with flat colours often loses a third of its size at Light and barely changes after that, because it has few colours to cut. A clip taken from a film or phone video is the opposite: Light may save 10%, while Strong can take it down to a fraction. That is why the three are shown together rather than hidden behind a single slider.

Fitting a size limit

Size limit mode works through a ladder of up to twenty settings ordered from gentlest to harshest, and uses a halving search to find the first rung that fits, so a typical GIF needs a handful of attempts rather than trying every one. The order of the ladder is deliberate:

Lossless re-optimisation, then lossy compression in steps.
Fewer colours: 128, then 64.
Smaller dimensions, one step at a time, but never narrower than the minimum width you set.
Only then, and only if you allow it, fewer frames: every second, third or fourth frame is kept.

If nothing on the ladder fits, you get the smallest version the tool could make, clearly marked as over the limit, so you can decide whether to lower the minimum width, allow frame dropping or shorten the clip in the program that made it. A GIF that is already under the limit is left exactly as it is.

Where the GIF is going	Size limit	Tip
Discord custom emoji	256 KB	Emoji are shown small; 128 px wide is plenty
Slack custom emoji	128 KB recommended, up to 50 frames	Square, transparent background works best
Email signatures and newsletters	No fixed rule; keep it well under 1 MB	Some email apps show only the first frame

For still images that need to go into Discord, use Compress Image for Discord instead. Photos are better as JPEG or WebP than as a GIF.

What makes a GIF so large?

GIF is a format from 1987, and it stores animation in the most literal way possible: as a sequence of separate pictures, each limited to 256 colours and compressed on its own with a method that looks for repeated runs of identical pixels. Four things drive the size:

Dimensions. A 480×270 GIF has 129,600 pixels per frame. At 720×405 it has 291,600 — more than twice as many for a picture that is only 1.5 times wider.
Frame count. Ten seconds at 20 frames per second is 200 pictures. Many GIFs made from video keep far more frames than the motion needs.
Noise and dithering. Film grain, camera noise and the dot patterns that converters use to fake extra colours break up the runs of identical pixels that GIF compression depends on. A noisy clip can be several times larger than a clean one of the same size.
How much changes between frames. If only a cursor moves across a still screen, each new frame needs to store only that small area. If the camera pans, every pixel changes every frame.

Dropping frames without speeding up the animation

Each GIF frame carries its own display time, in hundredths of a second. Deleting frames while leaving the remaining times as they were makes the animation play faster than the original. When this tool keeps one frame in two, the kept frame gets the time of both: two frames of 0.05 seconds become one frame of 0.10 seconds, and the loop takes exactly as long as before.

There is one subtlety this accounts for. Browsers do not honour very short times: a frame marked 0 or 0.01 seconds is played at 0.10 seconds. Those frames are counted at the time you actually see, not the number written in the file.

When a GIF will not shrink much

Some GIFs are already as small as they are going to get without visible damage. Signs of that are a Light version that saves under 5% and a card that says no gain — original kept. At that point your options are the visible ones: fewer colours, a smaller size or fewer frames, which is what Strong and size limit mode apply.

If you only need the GIF in a place that also accepts video, an MP4 or animated WebP will almost always be smaller at better quality. If you only need one still frame, save it with GIF to PNG (transparency kept) or GIF to JPG, and shrink that with Compress Image to Target Size.

Your GIFs stay on your device

Compression runs inside your browser. The first time you use the tool, it downloads the optimiser — about 340 KB — and runs it in a background worker; your GIF is read from your disk and the results are held in memory until you download them. Nothing is sent to a server, so there is no upload wait, no file size cap beyond your device's memory, and nothing to delete afterwards. Most GIFs are done in a few seconds; a very large one — tens of megabytes of video-like frames — can take half a minute or more, and longer on a phone.

The optimiser is Gifsicle by Eddie Kohler, compiled to WebAssembly, and free software under the GNU General Public License v2; its source code is available from the Gifsicle repository. More compressors for photos and screenshots are listed under image compression tools.

Frequently asked questions

How do I compress a GIF without losing quality?

Start with the Light version. It re-optimises how each frame is stored and applies only mild lossy compression, and every colour is kept, so on most GIFs you cannot tell it from the original. If Light saves little, the GIF was already stored efficiently, and any further reduction has to come from something you can see: fewer colours, smaller dimensions or fewer frames. Comparing the three versions side by side is the quickest way to decide how far you are happy to go.

How do I get a GIF under 256 KB for a Discord emoji?

Choose Fit a size limit and the 256 KB preset, which is Discord's size limit for custom emoji. The tool first tries lossy compression and fewer colours at full size; if that is not enough it scales the GIF down, and only as a last resort drops frames. Emoji are shown small anyway, so a 128 pixel wide GIF usually looks the same in chat and is far easier to fit. If it still will not fit, lower the minimum width or shorten the clip.

Why did my GIF barely get smaller?

Usually because it was exported by a tool that already optimised it, or because it is full of fine noise. GIF compression works by finding repeated runs of identical pixels; film grain, gradients and dithered colours give it very few to find. Scaling down helps most in that case - halving the width leaves a quarter of the pixels. The tool never hands you a file larger than the one you started with: if a level cannot improve on the original, the card says so and keeps the original.

Does compressing change the speed or remove frames?

Compare mode never removes frames. In size limit mode, frames are dropped only when every other option has failed to fit and the checkbox allows it. When that happens, each remaining frame is shown for as long as the frames it replaces, so a 3 second loop still takes 3 seconds - it just moves in slightly bigger steps. The result card tells you how many frames were kept.

What does lossy mean for a GIF?

GIF itself is a lossless format, but an encoder can choose pixels that are almost, not exactly, the colour of the original when that lets it reuse a pattern it has already stored. That is what the lossy setting does. Low values add a faint grain that is hard to spot in motion; high values show up as speckles, especially on flat areas and text. Light uses 30, Recommended 80 and Strong 140.

Are my GIFs uploaded to a server?

No. The optimiser is downloaded to your browser once and runs there, in a separate worker. Your GIF is read from your disk, compressed in memory and offered back as a download; it is never sent anywhere. That also means there is no file size cap from us - only your device's memory - and no queue.

Is transparency kept?

Yes. Transparent areas stay transparent at every level, and the previews are drawn on a checkerboard so you can see the edges. Reducing colours can make soft, anti-aliased edges a little rougher, because GIF transparency is all-or-nothing for each pixel; compare the Recommended and Light cards if your GIF has a lot of fine edges.

What are the GIF limits for Slack emoji?

Slack's help centre recommends square images under 128 KB for custom emoji, and animated GIFs can have up to 50 frames. The 128 KB preset takes care of the size. The frame count is shown next to each file name; the tool does not trim to a frame count, so if yours is over 50, cut the clip shorter before compressing.

Should I use MP4 or WebP instead of a GIF?

When the place you are posting to accepts them, yes: MP4 video and animated WebP store motion far more efficiently than GIF, which compresses every frame as a separate picture with at most 256 colours. But emoji pickers, many forums, email clients and README files still want a real GIF, and that is what this tool is for. If you only need a still picture, GIF to PNG saves the first frame as a sharp, transparent PNG.