GIF compressor

Animated GIFs are one of the least efficient ways to store moving pictures ever invented, which is why a five second reaction GIF or screen capture can weigh 10 MB. Most of that weight is repetition: GIF makers often store every frame in full, even when only a corner of the picture moves.

This compressor rewrites each frame to hold only what changed since the one before, the same frame optimisation gifsicle does, and at Medium or Strong it also ignores changes too small to see and trims the palette. For bigger savings, shrink the size or drop every second frame; the timing is kept either way.

Everything runs in your browser. Your GIFs are not uploaded to a website that keeps them for an hour, there is no watermark, and the limit on file size or count is your device’s memory (phones hold less).

The three Compression levels differ in two things. Light keeps the full 256 colours and only stores the changed part of each frame, so it looks identical and helps most on GIFs saved without any optimisation. Medium drops to 128 colours and treats very small changes as none, which removes much of the flicker noise in screen captures. Strong uses 64 colours and ignores larger changes; it suits cartoons and flat graphics better than photographs.

If you are coming from an online optimiser that has separate pages for optimising, resizing and removing frames, here the three happen in one pass: Compression, Size and Frames are applied together, to a whole batch at once. The GIF keeps its loop setting, and each result is saved with -compressed added to its name, so the original stays untouched.