Compress GIFRight in Your Browser

Animated GIFs are enormous by design: the format dates to 1987 and stores animation as a stack of full frames, each limited to 256 colors and compressed with an algorithm from the same era. A few seconds of screen recording exported as GIF easily exceeds the upload caps of Slack, Discord or a README — which is where targeted GIF compression earns its keep.

Three levers do almost all the work, and this tool exposes each with a live before/after readout. Frame rate is the big one: most GIFs ship at 25-30 fps, and dropping to 15 fps halves the data while staying smooth for UI captures and reaction clips. Dimensions are second — GIF pixels are expensive, so scaling to 75% or 50% pays off quadratically. The color palette is third: many GIFs don't use anywhere near 256 colors, and reducing to 128 or 64 shrinks every frame with little visible change on screen recordings.

The trade-offs are content-dependent: fast motion suffers first from frame-rate cuts, gradients and photos suffer first from palette cuts. Loop behavior and timing are preserved — only the size changes. If quality is collapsing before the file is small enough, that's the format's 1987 ceiling talking: for anything longer than a few seconds, an MP4 from our video compressor is dramatically smaller at far higher quality, wherever video is accepted.

Compression runs in your browser via FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly — the GIF never uploads, there's no watermark, and no length limits beyond your machine's patience.