Compress GIF images in your browser
A GIF optimizer that leaves the animation alone. Reduce GIF size by cutting colours, thinning frames or resizing, all on this device.
or browse your device. Everything is processed on this device
No GIF to hand?
How to compress a GIF
One or a hundred. They are read straight off your disk into this tab and never uploaded.
Start at 128 and keep going until you can see it. That single control usually does more than everything else combined.
Every 2nd frame halves the file again. We add the dropped delays back on, so the timing does not speed up.
Written from memory to your downloads, still animated, still looping.
What is a GIF file?
GIF was published by CompuServe in 1987, which makes it older than the web it now lives on. It stores an image as indexed colour: a table of at most 256 colours, then one index per pixel, compressed with LZW. That ceiling is why a photograph saved as a GIF looks banded and blotchy, and why it is still enormous while looking that way.
It survived because of one feature nothing else had at the time. A GIF can hold many frames with a delay on each and a loop count, so it plays by itself, in an ordinary image tag, with no player and no click. Two decades of reaction images and product demos ran on that.
Compressing a GIF therefore means something different from compressing a JPG. There is no quality slider, because there is no lossy transform to turn down. The size is the number of frames multiplied by the number of pixels, spent through a palette of at most 256 colours. So you shrink one of those three things, or you write the frames as differences from each other, which is what this tool does automatically.
GIF compression FAQ
Why is my GIF so big?
Because a GIF stores every frame as a full picture with no motion prediction at all. A five second clip at 15 frames a second is 75 separate images, and LZW compression from 1987 is not going to save you. A 10 second screen recording at 1080p routinely lands over 40MB as a GIF and under 2MB as an MP4.
Can I compress a GIF without losing the animation?
Yes, and that is the whole point of this tool. The GIF is decoded frame by frame, re-encoded frame by frame, and the delays and loop count are carried across, so what you download plays exactly like what you dropped in. Most online GIF tools run the file through a canvas, which keeps the first frame and silently throws away the rest.
How do I get a GIF under 5MB for Slack or Discord?
Turn on the target size and type 5000. We drop the palette to 128, then 64, then 32 colours, and only start thinning frames once colours run out, because a coarser palette is far less noticeable than a jerkier animation. If we cannot get there we say so rather than handing back something unwatchable.
GIF or WebP or MP4?
MP4 for anything longer than a couple of seconds: real video compression is 10 to 20 times better than GIF and it is not close. Animated WebP is typically 30 to 50% smaller than the same animation as a GIF and plays in every current browser. GIF only when the destination genuinely will not take anything else, which in 2026 mostly means old forum software and email.
How do I make a GIF smaller?
Pull the colours down first. A GIF is stored as a palette plus one index per pixel, so halving the palette is the cheapest saving there is and 128 colours is invisible on most animations. If that is not enough, halve the width, which quarters the pixel count. Dropping frames is the last resort, because it is the one people notice.
What is the best way to reduce GIF size without it looking bad?
In order: colours, then width, then frames. Colours and width are barely visible on a screen recording or flat artwork; frames are not. This tool also rewrites each frame as only the rectangle that changed since the last one, which costs nothing visually and is often the largest single saving on a recording where most of the picture holds still.
Will the colours change?
Yes, if you pull the palette down, which is the main saving. A GIF already has at most 256 colours, so going to 128 is usually invisible and 64 is fine for flat artwork and screen recordings. Photographic content starts to band at 32. Turn dithering on if you see stripes across a gradient, though it does add noise, and noise costs bytes.
Does dropping frames make it play faster?
No. Each dropped frame has its delay added to the frame before it, so the animation still takes the same time end to end. It just moves in bigger steps. That is the difference between compressing a GIF and breaking one.
Do my files get uploaded anywhere?
No. The decoder, the compressor and the encoder are all JavaScript running in this tab. There is no upload endpoint in the code to send anything to.
Other compressors
Same format joins the queue. Anything else re-routes to its own tool.