How to make a GIF file smaller

1. Make it smaller. Halving the width and height cuts each frame to a quarter of the pixels.
2. Make it shorter. Trim the dead time at the start and end.
3. Use fewer frames. Hold a pose instead of drawing it again.
4. Keep the background still and the colours flat.

To shrink a GIF you already have, press Open your GIF and pick it. The studio opens with each frame and its timing. Change the canvas size, delete frames you do not need, then press Save GIF. The message after saving shows the new file size.

To cut several frames at once, click the first one, shift-click the last (or long-press it on a phone), then press the Delete button that appears next to Loop selection.

Open your GIF always starts a new project. The Import button in the studio (behind ☰ on a phone) adds the GIF after the frames you already have.

A GIF is a series of still images, each with at most 256 colours, and only light compression between them. Unlike video it cannot describe movement. It can skip the parts of a frame that are the same as the frame before, and that is all. So the file grows with the pixels in each frame, the number of frames, and how much of the picture changes.

This is the biggest saving, because pixel count goes with the square of the size. Going from 800 pixels wide to 400 leaves a quarter of the pixels per frame. For a GIF seen in a chat or a forum post, 320 to 480 pixels wide usually looks the same as something twice the size.

In the studio, pick a smaller Canvas size or type a width and height and press Set. Your drawing is scaled to fit, and Undo takes it back.

Every second you remove takes its share of the file with it. Most clips have a moment of nothing at each end. Two to four seconds is a natural length for a GIF, and a tight loop looks deliberate rather than cut off.

Every frame is stored in full, so fewer frames means a smaller file. How you get there depends on where the frames came from.

From a video: in Video → GIF, choose your clip, then pick a lower Frame rate before you press Convert. At 10 frames a second you keep a third of what a 30 fps clip has, and the GIF still plays at normal speed. 10 is fine for most clips; 5 gives a choppy, classic GIF look.

Drawn by hand: the studio's fps slider only sets playback speed. Lowering it does not remove frames, it just slows the animation down. To save space, look for frames that barely change, such as a pose that pauses. Delete the extras and raise the hold on the one you keep (see step 6), so the "Shows" times still add up to the same length.

Parts of the picture that do not change between frames cost far less than parts that do. A drawing with a flat, still background and one moving character comes out much smaller than the same character over video footage or a gradient. When drawing, put the background on its own layer and leave it alone.

256 colours is a ceiling, not a target. Flat colour and hard edges, which a paint program produces anyway, compress much better than photo gradients, and look sharper at small sizes too. When converting footage, gradients and film grain are the expensive parts.

When a pose should stay on screen, raise the × number under that frame in the frame strip rather than copying the drawing several times. The "Shows" line below it tells you how long that is in seconds. The GIF then stores one frame with a longer delay instead of several identical frames.

For more than a few seconds of real footage, GIF is the wrong format. An MP4 of the same clip is often ten times smaller and looks better. The studio saves MP4 (or WebM) too, so use that wherever the destination accepts video. Keep GIF for short loops, drawings, and places where it must play everywhere without a click.

Related reading: drawing a GIF frame by frame and converting a video to a GIF.