How to crop a GIF
- Drop a GIF into the box above, or click it to choose one.
- Pick a shape: Square 1:1, Wide 16:9, Vertical 9:16, Portrait 4:5, 4:3, or Free for any size.
- Drag the white box over the part you want to keep, and pull its corner to make it bigger or smaller. The GIF keeps playing underneath, so you can check that nothing important moves out of the box. Arrow keys nudge the box one pixel at a time (ten with Shift), and you can type exact values.
- Press Crop GIF, check the result and download it.
What cropping does, and does not do, to a GIF
A GIF is a series of frames, each stored with a palette of up to 256 colours and a delay before the next one. Cropping here cuts every frame to the same rectangle and keeps everything else: the palette, the delays, the transparency, the loop setting. Nothing is decoded into full colour and squeezed back into a palette, which is the step that adds blotches and banding when a GIF passes through a video editor.
We checked that claim rather than assume it. Five test GIFs — a transparent emoji, a screen recording, an interface animation, a slow pan across flat colour blocks and a noisy video clip — were each cropped twice, once in the middle and once against the edge. For every result we compared, at the moment each original frame starts, the picture the cropped GIF shows with the same rectangle of the original. All ten matched pixel for pixel, and all ten had exactly the original loop length.
Why the frame count can drop
Frames often change only in one part of the picture: a cursor moving in a screen recording, a mouth in a reaction GIF. Crop away the moving part and some frames become identical to the one before them. Those are merged and their display time added to the previous frame, so the animation plays exactly as it did.
| Test GIF and crop | Frames | Loop length | File size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Screen recording 480×270, corner 160×90 | 60 → 5 | 3.60 s → 3.60 s | 14.3 KB → 864 bytes |
| Screen recording 480×270, middle 240×135 | 60 → 39 | 3.60 s → 3.60 s | 14.3 KB → 5.5 KB |
| Interface animation 480×270, middle 240×135 | 40 → 24 | 3.20 s → 3.20 s | 74.3 KB → 16.1 KB |
| Pan across colour blocks 400×300, middle 200×150 | 30 → 30 | 2.40 s → 2.40 s | 101.7 KB → 50.7 KB |
| Noisy video clip 400×300, middle 200×150 | 40 → 40 | 2.00 s → 2.00 s | 2.21 MB → 553 KB |
The file shrinks roughly with the area you keep, and more when the cut-away part was the only thing moving. A quarter of the picture usually means about a quarter of the file.
Which shape for what
| Where it is going | Shape | Next step |
|---|---|---|
| Discord, Slack or Twitch emoji, profile picture | Square 1:1 | Resize GIF to 128 px, then Compress GIF if it is over the limit |
| Reaction GIF, chat, forum signature | Free or 4:3 | Usually fine as it is |
| Stories, Reels, TikTok (as video) | Vertical 9:16 | GIF to MP4, since these apps want video |
| Banner, website header, README | Wide 16:9 | Resize GIF to the width of the column |
Things this page does not do
- Round crops. GIF transparency is on or off for each pixel, so a circle would have a jagged edge. Apps that show round avatars round a square image themselves.
- Cutting time. To keep only a few seconds, convert with GIF to MP4, trim the clip, and turn it back with Video to GIF.
- Different crops per frame. The box is the same on every frame; it does not follow a moving subject.
The cropping is done by Gifsicle, an open-source GIF tool, compiled to run in your browser. Your GIF is never uploaded — see where your files go.