Reverse a GIF
Play an animation backwards, or make it bounce forward and back.
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Backwards, or back and forth
Reversing plays the frames from last to first. Bouncing plays forward and then backward, which turns any clip into a seamless loop — the "boomerang" effect. Bouncing is usually what people actually want: a reversed clip still jumps when it loops back to the start, whereas a bounce ends where it began and repeats invisibly.
The turn skips the frame at each end rather than showing it twice. That sounds fussy and it is the difference between a smooth bounce and a visible hesitation at each extreme, which is very hard to un-see once you have noticed it.
Why the size limit is lower here
Reversing is the one operation that cannot be streamed. To emit the last frame first, every frame has to be decoded and held in memory before anything can be written. A long animation at a high frame rate is a great deal of uncompressed image data all at once, so this tool caps the frame count where the others cap the file size — and it tells you the count and the limit rather than failing vaguely.
If your animation is over the limit, run it through the optimizer first: halving the frame rate halves the frames, and on most animations it is barely visible.
What reverses well
Anything with continuous motion — a pan, a zoom, a wave, a spin. Anything where something falls, pours, spills or breaks is more interesting backwards than forwards, which is most of why the effect exists.
What does not work is anything with text or a UI in it. Reversed text still reads forwards but the animation now shows it disappearing, and a reversed screen recording of someone typing looks like a mistake rather than an effect.
The palette is rebuilt
Reversing means re-encoding, so the palette is regenerated from the frames. That is a chance to reduce the colour count at the same time if the file is larger than you want — 192 is a sensible default that is essentially indistinguishable from 256.
Sound
Not a consideration here — a GIF has never had audio, which is one of the reasons the format survives in places where autoplaying video is unwelcome.
Common questions
What is a boomerang GIF?
One that plays forward then backward, so it loops without a visible jump. That is the bounce option here.
Why does it refuse my file?
Reversing has to hold every frame in memory at once, so there is a frame-count limit. Reduce the frame rate with the optimizer first — halving it halves the frames.
Does bouncing double the file size?
Roughly, since it has close to twice the frames. Reducing the colour count at the same time usually offsets most of it.
Will the quality drop?
The palette is regenerated because the animation has to be re-encoded. At 192 colours or more the difference is not visible.
Can I reverse a video instead?
Not with this tool. Convert it to GIF first, or reverse it as a video and then convert.
Why does my reversed screen recording look odd?
Reversed text and interfaces read as mistakes rather than effects. The technique suits continuous physical motion.