Do you have a GIF that is too big for where you want to put it, or one where only a corner of the picture is worth keeping?
Don’t worry, you are not alone, and you do not need to install anything. Add your GIF below, choose a new size or drag a box around the part you want, and download it. The animation, the speed and the loop all stay as they were, and nothing is uploaded.
Your GIF never leaves this computer. It is read and written in your browser, frame by frame. Nothing is uploaded.
Drag a box on the picture above, or type the numbers here. They are in pixels, counted from the top left.
Why most GIF resizers ruin the animation
This is the part nobody explains, and it is the reason a resized GIF sometimes comes back as a mess of half drawn shapes.
A GIF is not a stack of complete pictures. The first frame is complete. After that, most frames are only the small patch that changed, with a note saying what to do with the frame underneath first: leave it, wipe it, or put back what was there before.
Think of it like a flip book where the artist only redrew the hand that moves, on a little square of paper stuck over the page. Cut every page down to half size and the little squares no longer sit where they belong.
So this tool builds every frame into a full picture first, resizes that, and then works out the patches again on the way out. That is slower than resizing the patches directly, and it is the only way the result plays properly.
Resizing, and choosing a size that still looks right
Type a width and the height follows, so the picture keeps its shape. Untick “Keep the shape” if you really want to squash it, which is sometimes what a banner slot needs.
The quick buttons for three quarters, half and a quarter are there because that is how most people actually think about it. Half size is a good first try for anything going into an email or a chat.
Shrinking is done by averaging, so every pixel of the original has a say in the result rather than three quarters of them being thrown away. Growing a GIF works too, though it cannot invent detail that was never there, and a small GIF blown up will look soft.
Cropping a part out of it
Switch to “Crop a part out of it” and drag a box on the picture. The four numbers underneath update as you drag, and you can type them instead if you need an exact size.
The crop is the same on every frame, which is what you want almost always. If the thing you are cropping to moves across the screen during the animation, pick a box that holds it for the whole loop, or crop first and then resize.
Cropping is also the most reliable way to make a GIF smaller in file size, because you are removing whole areas rather than asking the same picture to fit in fewer pixels.
Why a smaller GIF is sometimes a bigger file
This surprises people, so here is the honest reason.
A GIF holds at most 256 colours per frame, and it stores them as a list. When the picture is shrunk, the averaging blends neighbouring colours into new ones, so a frame that used 40 flat colours can come out needing hundreds. They get cut back down to 256, and the file now has a lot of small colour changes where it used to have flat blocks, which compresses less well.
The tool tells you afterwards whether the file got smaller or bigger, and by how much. If it went up, crop away what you do not need, or go smaller than half.
See-through GIFs and the hard edge
A GIF pixel is either fully see-through or fully solid. There is nothing in between, unlike a PNG.
That means a see-through GIF gets a hard, slightly jagged edge when it is resized, because the soft edge that shrinking creates has to be forced back to one or the other. Every GIF tool has this, including the expensive ones. It is the file format, not the tool.
Coming the other way, if what you have is an animated WEBP, our WEBP to GIF converter makes the GIF first and this page can then shrink it.
If the edge matters more than the animation, a still picture as a PNG will look better. Our WEBP to PNG converter and the image resizer handle those.
What it does with the speed and the loop
Every frame carries its own delay, and a GIF can say how many times it should loop. Both are copied over untouched.
One thing worth knowing: many GIFs ask for a delay of zero, which no browser obeys. Browsers treat zero, and usually one, as a tenth of a second, which is why a GIF can look slower on a web page than in the program that made it. The tool says so when it sees those frames, and it leaves them exactly as they are so the file behaves the same everywhere it did before.
Nothing is uploaded
The GIF is read, resized and written in your own browser. It never travels to a server, there is no queue, and there is no file of yours sitting on somebody’s disk waiting to be deleted.
The honest limit of that: everything happens with your computer’s memory, so this tool stops at 40 MB and at 4000 pixels on a side. A very long animation on an old phone will take a few seconds and the button counts the frames as it goes.
Frequently asked questions
Does resizing a GIF stop it from moving?
Not here. Every frame is kept, with its own delay and the original loop count. A tool that hands you back a still picture has flattened the animation, which is the most common complaint about free GIF resizers.
What size should a GIF be for email or chat?
There is no single right answer, because it depends where it is going. As a rough guide, 480 pixels wide is plenty for a chat message, and a GIF over about 5 MB gets refused or silently squashed by several email systems.
Can I crop and resize at the same time?
Do it in two goes. Crop first, download, then put that file back in and resize it. Doing it in one pass would mean deciding for you which order to apply them, and the two orders give different results.
Will it work on my phone?
Yes, in the phone’s browser, and the box for cropping is dragged with a finger the same way. A long animation takes longer on a phone than on a computer, because all of the work happens on the device.
Is a GIF still the right choice?
Often not, and it is fair to say so. For a web page, a short MP4 or a WEBP animation is smaller and sharper than the same thing as a GIF. GIF is still the right choice when the place you are posting to only accepts GIF, which is most chat apps and a lot of forums and email signatures.
Does it keep the quality?
It keeps as much as the format allows. Colours are worked out again for each frame from the frame itself, so a frame of blues keeps its blues rather than being forced onto a standard palette. What cannot be kept is detail you removed by making the picture smaller.
What if I only want a still picture from it?
Then you want our GIF to PNG converter instead. It takes the first frame, or every frame numbered in a ZIP, with the see-through parts kept exactly as they are.
If you have any issues, you can ask me via comment, and I will love to help you out.