Compress a GIF — Keep It Animated

The four things that make a GIF big

A GIF's size is roughly pixels per frame × number of frames, discounted by how well each frame compresses. GIF compression (LZW) works by finding repeated runs of the same colour, so anything that breaks those runs — camera noise, dithering, smooth gradients, lots of colours — makes the file grow. Each control on this page attacks one part of that:

What the compressor always does

Before any of those settings, each frame after the first is compared with what is already on screen. Pixels that have not changed are written as transparent and the previous frame is left in place, which is how well-made GIFs keep a still background almost free. On a screen recording or a meme with a static backdrop, that step alone can make a big difference, and with Lossy off nothing is thrown away beyond fitting each frame into a 256-colour palette — which a GIF already is. It needs solid frames, so if your GIF has transparent areas, either keep them (frames are then written whole) or fill them with the colour of the page or chat it will sit on.

Hitting a size limit

Pick a target and the compressor works through ten steps, stopping at the first one that fits. It gives up the least visible detail first: light lossy matching, then colours, then 85% and 75% dimensions, then every second frame, down to 40% size, 16 colours and every third frame. The settings it used are shown under the result, so you can switch to manual and fine-tune from there. For emoji, it is usually better to resize the GIF to the exact emoji size first (128 × 128 for Discord), then compress — a small GIF needs far less squeezing.

When not to use a GIF at all

If the site or app accepts video, an MP4 of the same clip is usually a fraction of the size of even a heavily compressed GIF and keeps full colour: use GIF to MP4. For still images, the image compressor gets JPG, PNG and WebP files under a kilobyte target the same way.