Compress GIF animations

Shrink animated GIFs with fewer colors, smarter frames and resizing. The animation stays.

Drop files here

Choose files

GIF · JPG · PNG · SVG · TIFF · WebP

Files never leave your device

Loading the compressor…

How to compress GIF files

Add your files
Drop files on the box, paste them or choose them from your device. Nothing is uploaded.
Check the settings
The default preset suits most files. Change quality, size or format if you need a smaller file.
Download the result
Save each file or all of them as one ZIP. If a file cannot get smaller, you keep the original.

GIF: an old format that refuses to go away

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) dates from 1987, and the 89a version from 1989 added the two features that keep it alive: animation and a transparent color. Reactions in chat apps, small banners, loading spinners and short screen recordings in bug reports are still shared as GIFs because every browser, email client and messenger can show them without a video player.

The format has hard limits. Each frame can use at most 256 colors from a palette, and transparency is all-or-nothing: a pixel is either fully visible or fully clear, with no soft edges. Compression is LZW, a lossless method that works well on flat areas of color and badly on photos, noise and gradients.

Why animated GIFs get so large

A GIF has no motion prediction. A video codec stores one full picture and then mostly the changes; a GIF stores every frame as its own image. Ten seconds at 15 frames per second is 150 pictures. If they were recorded from a phone screen at 1080 pixels wide, each frame alone can be hundreds of kilobytes, and the whole animation quickly runs into tens of megabytes.

The tool attacks that in the ways the format allows, while keeping the animation and its timing:

Frame differencing. Pixels that stay the same as in the previous frame (or, when colors are reduced, nearly the same) are made transparent, so LZW only has to encode what moved.
Palette reduction. Fewer colors means shorter codes and longer runs of identical pixels.
Resizing. Halving the width and height cuts the pixel count of every frame to a quarter, which usually saves more than anything else.

Recommended settings

Where the GIF goes	Width	Colors
Chat reaction or sticker	320–480 px	64–128
Email newsletter	640 px (close to the usual 600 px email layout)	128
Bug report or tutorial capture	800 px or the original size	64–256, depending on how many colors the interface has
Static logo or icon	actual size	as few as look right; consider PNG instead

Screen recordings of software usually have few colors and survive 64 colors well. Footage of real scenes with skin tones and skies needs the full 256 and still shows banding; that kind of content is better as video.

Expect very different results from file to file. In our tests at the default 128 colors, two already optimized real-world GIFs could not be made smaller at all, while a test animation saved the simple way, with full frames and a palette per frame, became 79 % smaller.

When to convert instead

If the place you are posting accepts video, an MP4 made from the same frames is typically many times smaller than the GIF, with full color. Animated WebP is another option for websites: it supports 24-bit color and soft transparency and is displayed by all current browsers. For a GIF that does not move at all, PNG is lossless, supports soft edges and is usually smaller.

Stay with GIF when the destination is an email (many email clients ignore video and animated WebP) or a platform that only accepts GIF uploads.

GIF questions

Will my GIF still be animated?

Yes. Frame order, frame delays and the loop setting are kept. Only the way each frame is stored, the palette and, if you choose, the size change.

Why does the compressed GIF show bands or blotches?

With fewer colors, smooth gradients turn into visible steps, and pixels that changed only slightly between frames are kept from the previous frame. Raise the color count if this bothers you; at 256 colors that reuse is switched off.

Can I remove frames to make it smaller?

Yes. Turn on "Halve the frame rate": every second frame is dropped and the animation keeps its length. Because every frame is stored separately, this is very effective for long animations; 12–15 frames per second is usually enough for screen recordings. Identical frames are merged in any case.

Does GIF support transparency?

One palette entry can be marked as transparent, so a pixel is either fully shown or fully hidden. Logos with soft antialiased edges get a jagged outline; PNG or WebP handle them properly.

Is GIF compression lossy?

The LZW stage is lossless, and a GIF that already has few enough colors is only re-encoded more efficiently. Losses come from reducing the palette, resizing or halving the frame rate, and you control all three settings.

Other tools

All image types are listed on the image compression page. The how it works page explains why everything runs inside your browser.