Compress GIF

GIF dates from 1987. It stores every frame as an image of up to 256 colors and compresses it with a simple lossless method. That works for small, flat graphics, but animations with photos, gradients or many frames quickly reach several megabytes or more.

Large GIFs cause real problems: chat apps and forums reject them, email newsletters load slowly, and websites get heavier. The tool shows the file's size, dimensions, frame count and duration as soon as you load it, so you can see what you are working with.

The Target size buttons set a hard limit: 128 KB (Slack emoji), 256 KB (Discord emoji), 1 MB, 5 MB or 10 MB (Discord free upload). The tool then works through colors, dimensions and frame dropping by itself, in up to eight rounds, and tells you what it had to give up to get there.

If the target can't be reached (a long, high-resolution recording, say), you get the smallest version it managed plus advice on what to try: crop or resize it first.

Setting	Effect on size	Effect on look
Fewer colors (256 → 16)	Often large savings	Banding in gradients, grain in photos
Smaller size (100% → 25%)	Very large savings: half the width is about a quarter of the pixels	Smaller animation
Fewer frames (every 2nd or 3rd)	Roughly proportional savings	Choppier motion; total duration stays the same
Shared color palette	Smaller file	Can flicker in some animations; turn it off if so

Quick presets:

• Light: keeps all colors and frames, only re-encodes. Good for already reasonable GIFs.
• Medium: 128 colors and 85% size. A good default for most GIFs.
• Strong: 64 colors, 70% size and every second frame. For strict limits.

• Chat and messaging apps often limit uploads or show large GIFs as files rather than animations. Aim for a few megabytes at most.
• Email newsletters: keep GIFs small, ideally under about 1 MB, so they load quickly on phones.
• Websites: consider whether a short video (MP4 or WebM) would be better; it is usually far smaller than a GIF of the same clip.
• Social profile banners and forums often have their own limits; check the platform's help page.

If the GIF is still too big after compression, combine the methods: scale to 50–60% and keep every second frame.

The preview below the result plays the compressed animation, so check it before you post.

The tool decodes every frame in your browser, rebuilds each full frame exactly as a GIF viewer would show it, and then re-encodes the animation with your settings. The original timing is kept: when frames are skipped, the remaining frames are shown longer, so the animation still lasts the same time.

Nothing is uploaded. That makes the tool safe for screen recordings of private chats or internal software. The compressed file is named after the original with a "-compressed" suffix.

• Flickering colors: turn off the shared palette, so each frame gets its own colors.
• Grainy photos: raise the number of colors and reduce the size instead.
• Choppy motion: keep all frames and compress with size and colors only.
• Not smaller: some GIFs are already well optimized. Try fewer colors or a smaller size; the tool tells you when a setting did not help.

To make a new GIF from images, use the GIF maker. To extract one frame as a still image, use GIF to PNG.