Compress GIF
Animated GIFs are notoriously heavy — a 5-second clip can easily hit 10 MB because every frame stores its own palette and LZW-compressed raster. This tool shrinks GIFs by quantising the palette, dropping redundant frames, and optionally scaling dimensions. You get the same loop, a fraction of the weight.
How GIF compression works
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1
Drop in your GIF
Any size, animated or static. The tool reads every frame, the global palette and the frame delays.
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2
Pick the compression strategy
Reduce colours (256 to 64 or 32), drop every other frame (halves size instantly), or scale down dimensions.
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3
Preview the loop
See the optimised GIF play before you download. Compare the weight against the original.
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4
Download
Save the compressed file. Original untouched.
Where the bytes live in a GIF
A GIF is a sequence of frames, each with a local colour table (up to 256 colours) and a block of LZW-compressed pixel indices. Unlike video codecs, GIF does not do motion compensation — every frame stores the full raster, even if only three pixels changed. That is why a 30fps 5-second GIF is 150 full images concatenated together.
What actually shrinks size
| Technique | Savings | Quality cost |
|---|---|---|
| Palette reduction (256→64) | 20-35% | Noticeable banding on gradients |
| Drop every other frame | ~50% | Jerkier motion (15fps instead of 30fps) |
| Scale to 75% width | ~44% | Smaller on screen, otherwise fine |
| Lossy LZW (gifsicle -O3) | 10-25% | Minor dithering artifacts |
Combining palette reduction + frame dropping usually cuts a GIF by 60-70% with barely visible loss.
When to stop using GIF
If your clip is longer than 3 seconds or larger than 600 px wide, an MP4 or WebM will be 5-20x smaller at the same perceived quality. Most platforms (Twitter, Slack, Discord, even old-school forums) auto-play MP4 now. GIF only survives where autoplaying video is blocked or where the file is literally embedded as an <img> tag.
Tips
- Start by scaling down — a 1200px GIF is almost never necessary.
- Strip the first and last identical frames (common when exporting from screen recorders).
- If colours are flat (screencasts, line-art animation), 32-colour palette is invisible.
- For photographic content, GIF is the wrong format. Convert to MP4.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. The loop count is preserved from the original file (infinite loop, or a specific count). Only the pixel data and optionally the frame count change.
Practically, you can often reach 20-30% of the original size without obvious quality loss. Going below that usually means dropping to 32 colours or 10fps, which is visible but sometimes acceptable for UI animations.
If the destination supports video, yes — MP4/WebM is 5-20x smaller. Stick with GIF only where video cannot autoplay, such as email clients and some legacy forums.
Compression runs client-side in your browser when possible. Nothing is stored after the session ends.