filetity

GIF -> SMALLER GIF · Local tool

Compress GIF

Compress animated GIF files and still ones, without breaking the animation.

Last updated

How do I make a GIF smaller without uploading it?

filetity's GIF compressor shrinks an animated GIF inside your browser tab and hands the result straight back to your device, with nothing uploaded. A GIF gets smaller two ways, and both are visible trade-offs you can judge before saving: storing fewer colours, which shows up as banding across smooth areas, and keeping fewer frames, which makes the motion choppier. This is the tool for a GIF that is too big for a Slack message, a WhatsApp send or an upload form with a size cap. If the animation is simply longer than it needs to be, trimming it usually saves more than compressing it does.

  1. 01 / Your device

    the file stays here

  2. 02 / Browser memory

    the work runs locally

  3. 03 / Back to you

    saved on this device

When you would use this

Situations, not settings.

A GIF too heavy for the chat
Slack and Discord both cap uploads. Scaling the frames and thinning them keeps the animation and loses the weight.
A screen recording saved as GIF
Capture tools write every frame at full size. Most of them are nearly identical and can go.
An email that will not send
A demo GIF in a newsletter has to clear the same attachment limits as anything else.

How it works / no cloud

A conversion engine, not an upload form.

filetity decodes every frame of the GIF in your browser, composites each one into a full picture, scales it down and drops frames if you asked it to, then re-encodes the animation. The delay from each dropped frame is added to the frame before it, so the animation still runs for the same length of time.

  • Offline ready
  • Installable app
  • No file limit queue

Straight answers

No accordion. Nothing hidden.

Is it free?
Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
Does it need an account?
No. There is no account system.
Is my file processed on my device?
Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
What formats are supported?
Animated or still GIF in. GIF out, animation preserved.
What are the limits?
One GIF at a time. A long animation at full resolution holds every frame in memory at once, so a very large file is limited by the memory your device gives the tab.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
Does it work offline?
Yes, after you have used it once. Your browser keeps what the tool needs, so it then works with no network connection.
Will my animation still play?
Yes. Every frame is decoded, changed and written back as an animation, and the loop setting from the original is carried over. Dropping frames makes the file smaller and the motion slightly less smooth; it never turns the GIF into a still image.
Why does dropping frames not speed the animation up?
Because the time belonging to each removed frame is added to the one kept before it. A one second animation is still one second afterwards. Tools that skip this step are why a compressed GIF sometimes plays at triple speed.
How much smaller will it get?
It depends entirely on the GIF, so the page tells you the real number after it runs rather than promising one now. Scaling to half size and keeping every second frame is usually the biggest win for the least visible damage.
Why does the resized GIF look blocky rather than smooth?
That is deliberate. A GIF holds at most 256 colours, so smoothing between pixels invents colours the palette cannot store, which then have to be forced back to the nearest one they can. Reusing the exact original pixels is both faster and sharper for the screen recordings and pixel art that GIFs usually hold.
What does the transparency turn into?
One clear colour, as GIF requires. A pixel that is more than half transparent becomes fully clear and anything else becomes solid, because a GIF has no partial transparency to keep.

Keep working locally

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