GIF optimizer
Make a GIF smaller by resizing it, cutting the frame rate or reducing the palette.
Drop your file here
Processed securely and deleted within the hour.
Four levers, in order of effect
Reducing the colours is almost always the biggest win and the least visible. A GIF allows 256 and most animations do not need them: 128 is usually indistinguishable from 256, and 64 is fine for screen recordings, line art and anything with flat colour. Try it before touching anything else.
Width is next, and it is quadratic — halving the width quarters the pixel count. A GIF displayed at 480 pixels in a document does not need to be 1200 wide.
Frame rate is third. Going from 25 fps to 12 roughly halves the file and is barely perceptible on most animations, because a GIF is rarely showing fast motion.
Cropping is the one people forget. A screen recording usually has a large area that never changes — a browser chrome, a desktop background — and cutting it away removes it from every single frame.
Why it sometimes comes out bigger
Worth understanding rather than being surprised by. A GIF stores only the changed rectangle of each frame, so an animation with a static background is already extremely well compressed. Scaling it introduces interpolated pixels along every edge where there were hard boundaries, and dithering adds high-frequency noise — both compress worse than what was there before. When that happens the result says so plainly rather than reporting a negative saving as though it were an achievement.
If a GIF will not get smaller, it is already lean, and the answer is a different format rather than harder settings.
The bigger win is usually not a GIF
Be honest with yourself about where the file is going. For a web page, MP4 is typically around a tenth of the size, and animated WebP around a third — both with 24-bit colour instead of 256, so they look better as well. Optimising a GIF is the right move when it has to remain a GIF: a chat window, an email, a slide deck, a README.
The palette is rebuilt, not reused
Reducing to 64 colours does not pick 64 of the original palette. A new palette is generated from the actual frames, weighted toward the parts that move, and the frames are mapped through it. That is why a 64-colour result here looks considerably better than the same count from a tool that simply discards palette entries.
Everything runs on our server
GIF re-encoding needs ffmpeg and is not something a browser tab does at any sensible speed. Each job runs in its own directory and is deleted as soon as your download has been sent.
Common questions
What is the fastest way to shrink a GIF?
Reduce the colours. Going from 256 to 128 is usually invisible and often removes a third of the file. Then reduce the width.
Why did my GIF get bigger?
It was already well compressed. Scaling softens hard edges and dithering adds noise, and both compress worse than what was there. The result says so when it happens.
Will reducing colours look bad?
Rarely at 128. At 64 you may see banding on gradients but not on flat colour or screen recordings. Try the lowest setting that still looks right — the saving is large.
Should I convert to MP4 or WebP instead?
If the destination allows it, yes — roughly a tenth and a third of the size respectively, with full colour. Keep GIF when it has to paste into a chat or an email.
Can I crop and resize at once?
Yes. Cropping is applied first, then the resize, so the width you give is the width of the cropped result.
Is there a file size limit?
60 MB, which is very large for a GIF. If yours is bigger, it should almost certainly be a video.