Compress a GIF to reduce its file size and keep it a GIF, for chat apps, forums, emails and anywhere a video will not do. Three settings decide the size: width, from the GIF’s own down to 16 px; a frame-rate cap from 1 to 60 fps; and the palette, from 256 colours down to 2, with optional dithering. Before you export, the panel encodes a sample of real frames at those settings to estimate the size, and shows a short animated preview of the quality. Defaults are 480 px, 12 fps and 128 colours. The GIF is processed on your device and never uploaded.
How it works
- Drop a GIF, or up to 100 for one batch with the same settings.
- Lower the width, the FPS cap or the colours, and watch the size estimate and sample preview update.
- Press Compress GIF. The result shows the new size next to the old one, with the percentage saved.
Questions
- Will compressing make my GIF choppy?
- Only if the FPS cap is below the GIF’s own frame rate. Then neighbouring frames are merged and their delays added together, so the animation runs exactly as long as before but shows fewer distinct frames. The default cap of 12 fps only thins out GIFs faster than that; raise it to 60 to keep nearly every frame and save bytes with width and colours instead.
- Why is my compressed GIF bigger than the original?
- It happens with GIFs that were already optimised to store only the pixels that change from frame to frame. This compressor writes every frame in full with one shared palette, so on that kind of file the savings have to come from width, frame rate and colours. The estimate shows the projected size before you export, so you can see it coming and adjust.
- Does compressing keep a transparent background?
- No. Every frame is re-encoded as a full, solid image with one shared palette, so see-through areas come out filled in rather than transparent. That suits most reaction GIFs and screen captures, which have no transparency to lose; for a sticker or overlay that must stay see-through, this is not the right tool.
- Does my file get uploaded?
- No. The models and all processing run inside your browser on your own device. You can verify this yourself: open your browser’s DevTools, watch the Network tab, and process a file: there are no uploads. After the first visit most tools also work fully offline.
- Why convert a GIF to MP4?
- GIF is a 1989 format with 256 colours and no real compression, so an MP4 of the same clip is typically 5–15× smaller and plays everywhere a GIF does. Every major platform already does this conversion to your uploads.
- How does the GIF compressor shrink files?
- Three levers: fewer pixels (width), fewer frames per second, and fewer colours per frame. The projected size updates as you move each one, so you trade quality for bytes deliberately rather than by trial export.