Compress GIF — Reduce Animated GIF Size

Make animated GIFs small enough to share

GIFs are easy to post anywhere, but they are also one of the least efficient image formats. A few seconds of screen recording can easily weigh 10 MB, which is over the limit for many chat apps, email clients, forums and issue trackers. This GIF compressor reduces the file size of animated GIFs while keeping the animation intact, so you can attach it, embed it in documentation or use it on a web page without slowing the page down.

Everything happens locally. The GIF is decoded frame by frame in your browser, optimized and encoded again, and you see the original and the compressed version side by side with their sizes. Nothing is uploaded, there is no watermark and no account.

How the compression works

Four techniques are combined. Fewer colors: each frame is quantized to a smaller palette (128, 64, 32 or 16 colors instead of 256), which makes the LZW data more repetitive. Lossy frame optimization: pixels that are nearly identical to the previous frame are stored as transparent, so static backgrounds cost almost nothing — this is usually the biggest win for screen recordings and UI demos. Frame dropping keeps every 2nd or 3rd frame and merges the delays so the duration stays the same. Resizing reduces the number of pixels per frame, which shrinks the file roughly in proportion to the area.

Choosing the right settings

Start with Medium; it keeps quality close to the original. If the file is still too large, try Strong, which uses 64 colors, a higher lossy tolerance, every 2nd frame and 75% size. Cartoons, logos and UI recordings tolerate fewer colors very well, while photographic clips look better with more colors and a smaller size instead. If the result is not smaller than the original, the source was already well optimized — reduce the size or the frame count to save more.