# Compress GIF

Compress animated GIF files by scaling them down and thinning their frames, with the animation intact. Free, no watermark, and nothing is uploaded.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/compress-gif

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: Animated or still GIF in. GIF out, animation preserved.
- 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.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, after you have used it once. Your browser keeps what the tool needs, so it then works with no network connection.

## Questions

### 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.

## Related tools

- [Resize GIF](https://filetity.com/resize-gif): Scale an animated GIF down, animation intact.
- [Crop GIF](https://filetity.com/crop-gif): Cut a rectangle out of an animated GIF, every frame together.
- [Image Compressor](https://filetity.com/image-compressor): Compress an image to a size you name, or to a quality you pick, and see the real result before downloading.