GIF compressor

There is no quality slider in a GIF

JPEG has a quality setting from 0 to 100. GIF has nothing like it. Making a GIF smaller always means taking something out of it, and the only question is what goes first.

The order things are cut

1. The palette is rebuilt from what is actually on screen. GIFs exported by other software often carry colours they never use, so this step alone can take a third off.
2. The frame rate comes down if that was not enough. Fewer frames per second is hard to notice in most animations.
3. The picture gets smaller only as a last resort, and only if you allowed it in the settings.

That order follows what people notice least. Each pass is checked against your target, and the work stops as soon as the file fits.

Picking a target

A custom Discord emoji must be 256 KB or less, which is why that preset exists. The 2 MB and 5 MB options are sensible defaults for chat apps and email rather than official limits, so check the rules of wherever you are posting if the exact number matters. "As small as it goes" has no fixed figure: it aims well below half the original and stops before the damage shows.

When to convert instead

If the GIF started life as a video, with real footage, gradients and lots of movement, palette tricks will not rescue it. Turning it into an MP4 with GIF to MP4 gives a much smaller file and a better picture. Compression is for GIFs that have to stay GIFs, like emoji, stickers and anything an upload form insists on.

Questions