GIF Compressor - Reduce GIF File Size Online

A GIF is a stack of full pictures played in a row, so files get big fast: a ten second screen recording can pass 20 MB. This GIF compressor cuts that down by throwing away what your eye does not notice, such as colours you cannot tell apart, fine grain you cannot see and frames that barely differ. Most GIFs come out 55-90% smaller with no visible change.

There is no file size limit, which is rare for an online GIF compressor, and every file is compressed inside your browser, so it never touches a server. The only real ceiling is your own device, since a very large GIF needs enough memory to decode.

How do I compress a GIF?

1. Select GIF. Click the button or drop the file on the box above. Several GIFs at once is fine.
2. Pick a Compression level. Low, Medium or High. Medium is the right answer for almost everyone.
3. Fine-tune if you need to. Tick Show Advance Settings for direct control over Lossy Compression, Reduce Colors, Scale GIF and Skip Frames.
4. Optimize GIF. Click the button, wait for the card that shows the size, dimensions and frames Before and After, then download.

Which compression level should you use?

The three presets are pre-filled sets of the advanced settings. Here is what each one does and when it is the right pick.

With 8 frames or fewer nothing is dropped and the lossy level goes up by 50 instead. Dropping frames makes a GIF play a little faster, because the frames that stay keep their own timing. If that bothers you, untick Skip Frames under Show Advance Settings, or tick Add Delay In Frames to keep the speed.

If what you are after is a lower quality GIF for its own sake, a GIF quality reducer rather than a size saver, High is the preset to pick. It makes the picture a little rougher and the file much smaller, and you can push further by raising Lossy Compression under Show Advance Settings.

What the presets did to three real GIFs

We ran three GIFs through this page. The spread is the point: a busy clip has plenty to throw away, while a drawing with flat colours and few frames was already close to as small as it can go.

If you need to land on a specific number rather than a general cut, use the target size compressor instead. It works backwards from the size you type in.

Can I compress a GIF without losing quality?

Partly. Two of the steps this compressor takes are lossless: it stores only the part of each frame that changed from the one before, and it merges frames that are exact copies. Those cost nothing in quality, and on a GIF that was never optimised they can be the whole saving. The other steps, a lower colour count, the lossy level and dropped frames, do change the picture, and that is where the big cuts come from.

For the closest thing to lossless, tick Show Advance Settings, set Lossy Compression to 1, Reduce Colors to 256, Scale GIF to 0 and untick Skip Frames, then click Optimize GIF. A change that small is not visible. In our tests that setting took the 6.2 MB phone clip to 4.4 MB, the 20.8 MB weather animation to 17.1 MB and the 0.6 MB diagram to 0.5 MB, against 83%, 72% and 33% cuts for Medium. Medium is still the setting to try first, because the loss it adds is very hard to see and the saving is two to four times larger.

Why GIFs get so large

Knowing this makes the settings obvious. Unlike MP4, the GIF format has no motion compression: it cannot describe a frame as "the same as the last one but shifted a little". Every frame stores its own pixels. Three things drive the size of a GIF, and each one maps to a setting in this compressor:

• Frame count. A 15 FPS GIF that runs for eight seconds holds 120 separate pictures. Halving the frame rate roughly halves the file.
• Dimensions. Size grows with area, not width. Dropping an 800 by 600 GIF to 400 by 300 removes 75% of the pixels, not 50%.
• Colour palette. GIF holds at most 256 colours per frame. Cutting that to 128 or 64 shrinks every single frame at once.

The presets balance all three for you. To turn each dial yourself and watch the effect, the GIF optimizer explains and exposes all five techniques one by one.

Getting the most out of compression

• Crop before you compress. Cutting away dead space around the subject deletes pixels from every frame at once. It is almost always the single biggest win there is. Use the GIF cropper first, then come back here.
• Resize before you compress. If the GIF will be shown at 400 pixels wide, there is no reason to store it at 1200. The GIF resizer handles this.
• Compress once. Lossy compression cannot be undone. Running an already compressed GIF through again makes it worse for very little gain. Go back to the original and compress harder instead.
• Trim the boring parts. A two second loop usually says as much as a six second one at a third of the size.

Your GIF never leaves your browser

Nothing is uploaded. Every GIF is compressed by JavaScript running in your own browser, whatever its size. No server ever sees your file and there is no account, so nothing is tied to you. The page downloads its own code and sends nothing back.

Frequently Asked Questions