GIF Compressor — Reduce GIF File Size
Shrink animated GIF files directly on your device without quality guesswork. Balancing file weight against visual fidelity requires distinct strategies: reducing colors from 256 to 128, 64, or 32 shrinks the palette table and lengthens LZW compression runs without sacrificing frames; dropping every 2nd or 3rd frame cuts weight significantly while preserving total duration by adding dropped delays to retained frames; and scaling dimensions down to 75% or 50% yields quadratic byte savings when screen dimensions allow.
Use Cases
How to compress an animated GIF
Drag and drop your GIF or click to browse. Files up to 50 MB are parsed entirely in your browser.
Select a color palette limit (256, 128, 64, or 32 colors), choose whether to drop every 2nd or 3rd frame, and pick a resolution scale.
Click Run to quantize palettes and re-encode the GIF. The process runs locally with no server upload.
Compare before and after file sizes and percentage savings, preview the result, and download your compressed GIF.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How does color reduction compress GIFs?
- GIF uses an indexed palette of up to 256 colors. Dropping the color count to 128, 64, or 32 reduces palette header size and groups similar pixel values together, allowing LZW compression to find longer matching sequences.
- What is the trade-off with frame dropping?
- Dropping every 2nd frame cuts the frame count by 50% while adding the dropped delays to retained frames so total playback duration stays the same. The animation becomes less fluid but file size drops dramatically.
- When should I scale down dimensions instead of colors?
- If your GIF is displayed in a small chat box, forum signature, or mobile view, scaling to 75% or 50% delivers exponential byte savings because pixel count shrinks quadratically.
- Are my GIFs uploaded to a server?
- No. All decompression, color quantization, and LZW encoding happen on your local device via WebAssembly and JavaScript.
Private by design. Color quantization, frame dropping, and scaling run entirely in your browser — your GIF is never uploaded to a server.
Related tools
More free, in-browser tools from the GIF Tools set — every one runs locally, with no sign-up and no upload.