How to compress a GIF?
Upload your GIFs
Drag them in, paste with Ctrl+V or select them. You can add several at once.
Pick the compression
Light and medium reduce the color palette; strong also scales the GIF to 75% of its width and height.
Download the result
You will see each GIF's size before and after. Download them one by one or all together.
Why compress GIFs with Pictulab?
Free, no sign-up
No account or card needed, and it uses no tokens.
The animation stays
Every frame is compressed and none are dropped, so the GIF stays animated.
Private
Compression happens in your browser. Your GIFs never leave your device.
Never heavier
If a GIF was already optimized and cannot get any smaller, you get the original back instead of a heavier file.
Why GIFs are so heavy
A GIF stores every frame as an image with its own palette of up to 256 colors and compresses it losslessly. With many frames, high resolution or lots of detail, the file grows fast, and you notice it when a web page loads or when you send it in a chat.
How to compress a GIF without losing the animation
The two levers that save the most are the palette and the resolution. Fewer colors mean less information to store in each frame; fewer pixels mean lighter frames. This GIF compressor builds one palette for the whole GIF from what moves, applies it frame by frame and only redraws the area that changes from one frame to the next.
If the GIF comes from a video, it usually pays off more to make it light from the start with the video to GIF tool, which caps the frame rate and the width.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
Upload the GIF, pick the compression and click “Compress”. When it finishes you will see the size before and after, and you can download it.
No. Every frame is compressed, none are dropped, and the result keeps the animation.
“Light” keeps 192 colors in the palette and “Medium” 128, at the same resolution. “Strong” drops to 64 colors and scales the GIF to 75% of its width and height, which is what saves the most.
Some GIFs come out of the app that made them already well optimized, and re-encoding them does not make them lighter. In that case you get the original file back: try the strong level, which also reduces the dimensions.
No. The first time, your browser downloads the compression engine; from then on everything happens on your device.
Yes, 50 MB per GIF. To decode and re-encode the frames the browser keeps all of them in memory, and with larger files the tab can run out of it.
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