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Compress GIF

Frames optimised against each other and a lossy pass: half the bytes, same loop.

More free conversions, where you upload. The Fylane extension does the same work inside any upload form, on its own free share every day.Add to Chrome

How to compress GIF

  1. Drop the GIF.
  2. Pick how hard to compress.
  3. Press Compress and download.

What happens to your file

gifsicle rewrites the animation: each frame stores only what changed from the one before, a lossy pass lets nearly-identical pixels be stored as identical (that is where most of the bytes go), and the palette is cut if you asked. Timing, looping and transparency stay as they were. The report says the bytes before and after.

A GIF that is already optimised shrinks little — that is the honest answer, and the numbers say so.

Questions

How do I compress an animated GIF without ruining it?

Start at the light setting and look at the result. Light is hard to see at all; strong shows as slight banding in gradients. Flat cartoons and screen recordings survive the strong setting well because they have few colours to begin with; photographic GIFs do not.

Does the animation still play?

Yes. Timing, loop count and transparency are all preserved — only how the frames are stored changes.

Why did my GIF barely shrink?

Because it was already optimised, usually by whatever made it. There is no second helping of the same saving, and the page tells you the before and after bytes rather than pretending otherwise.

It is still too big. What now?

Resize it to a narrower width, which is the biggest single lever because a GIF stores whole frames and the bytes fall with the area. If it is still too large, the honest answer is that it should not be a GIF: the same clip as MP4 is routinely a tenth of the size.

Will reducing colours help?

Often a lot. A GIF carries at most 256 colours and most animations need far fewer; cutting the palette is where a surprising share of the saving comes from on screen recordings and cartoons.

Why is GIF so inefficient?

Because it stores frames as pictures rather than as motion. A video codec records what changed between frames and can look forwards as well as backwards; GIF was designed in 1987 for still images and never got that.

Do it once, not on every form

A form that wants a square JPEG under 240 KB says so on the page. The Fylane extension reads that, fits your photo to it, and puts it in the field — without you working out what 240 KB looks like.

And it keeps the result. The next application that asks for a résumé, a cover letter and a photo fills all three from one tap, each one refitted to what that site accepts.

Your files stay in the browser, encrypted, on your machine. Nothing is uploaded to keep them and nothing is sent anywhere to fill a form.

Filmed from the extension: a phone portrait against a form that takes only a square JPEG under 240 KB.

Add to Chrome — freeWhat it does

Do this in code

curl -X POST https://api.fylane.dev/v1/jobs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FYLANE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "file_id": "<file id>",
    "operation": "image.gif-optimize",
    "options": {
      "lossy": 80,
      "colors": 256
    }
  }'

The same operation, image.gif-optimize — An animated GIF made smaller without leaving the format: frames optimised, a lossy pass, fewer colours, a narrower width. Upload first with the quickstart; every option is on the operations page. 500 free credits a month, then $5 per thousand.