Compress GIF
Shrink oversized animated GIFs to fit the size limits of chat stickers, forum attachments, email and fast-loading web pages
Three levers at once
Dimensions, frame count and colour quality are each adjustable — halving the dimensions alone usually cuts the file to about a quarter
Frame dropping keeps the timing
The time from a dropped frame is handed to its neighbour, so total duration and pacing stay as they were — nothing turns into fast-forward
Processed locally, no upload
The whole decode and re-encode runs in your browser, so files never leave your device and there are no size or usage limits
Use Cases
- WeChat custom stickers cap a GIF at 1MB and 240×240 — oversized animations can be added right after compressing
- Forums and community platforms limit attachment and image sizes, and a screen-recorded GIF of tens of megabytes simply will not upload
- Demo animations in docs, READMEs and product notes load faster once compressed, so they stop slowing readers down
- Email attachments are commonly capped at 10–25MB, so a long animation has to slim down before it can be sent
Why GIFs are so big, and what can actually be compressed
GIF is a format from 1987: each frame is limited to 256 colours and there is no inter-frame compression like modern video has, which is why the same footage stored as GIF is often more than ten times larger than an MP4. That leaves only three things to compress: frame dimensions, frame count, and the number of colours per frame.
This tool decodes the GIF frame by frame with gifuct-js (restoring each frame to a full picture according to the GIF disposal rules), then re-quantises the palette and encodes the output with gif.js. Of the three settings, dimensions pay off most — halving width and height leaves a quarter of the pixels; frame dropping comes second; colour quality gives a smaller reduction but is useful when you would rather not sacrifice size. All of it is computed locally in your browser.
Related GIF tools
If you still cannot hit the size you need, consider changing format: turning the animation into a video makes it an order of magnitude smaller — use GIF to Video. Going the other way, use Video to GIF to cut an animation out of a video and Images to GIF to build one from photos, then come back here to compress the result.
Frequently Asked Questions
How small can a GIF actually get?
It depends on the source and the settings. Dimensions give the biggest win: halving width and height leaves only a quarter of the pixels, which usually brings the file down to 25%–35% of the original. Add dropping half the frames and most GIFs land around 15% of their original size. Changing only colour quality, without touching size or frames, typically saves 10%–30%.
Does dropping frames speed the animation up?
No. When a frame is dropped its display time is added to the frame kept before it, so total duration and playback speed stay exactly the same — only smoothness goes down. For GIFs that already have a low frame rate, keep all frames.
How do I get a GIF under a chat sticker size limit?
WeChat custom stickers, for example, cap each file at 1MB and 240×240. Pick a size setting that brings both width and height within 240, drop half the frames, and leave colour quality on "Balanced"; then check the size shown in the result panel. If it is still too big, switch colour quality to "Smallest file" or scale down further.
Why did my GIF get bigger after compressing?
A few GIFs are already aggressively optimised — each frame stores only a tiny changed region — and re-encoding writes every frame as a full picture, which cancels that optimisation out. When this happens, set dimensions to 50% or lower, or drop half the frames, and the size will come down again.
Will my GIF be uploaded to a server?
No. Decoding, scaling and re-encoding all happen locally in your browser. Your GIF never leaves your device and is never uploaded anywhere.
Will compressing a large GIF freeze my browser?
GIF compression decodes and then re-encodes every single frame, so the more frames there are the longer it takes — a several-hundred-frame animation can take a while on a phone. If your goal is mainly a smaller file, scaling dimensions down to 50% also cuts the processing time dramatically.