Animated GIFs remain a popular format for digital marketing and design. However, their file sizes can quickly become unwieldy. Here are 10 up-to-date, easy tips to help you resize and optimise your animated GIFs for better performance.
- Use GIMP for manual optimisation: GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a powerful, free tool that allows you to manually optimise your GIFs. You can reduce colours, adjust frame delays, and remove unnecessary frames to significantly reduce file size.
- Leverage Adobe Photoshop's Export Options: Adobe Photoshop offers robust GIF optimisation features. Use the "Export As" option to fine-tune colour reduction, dithering, and lossy compression settings.
- Try Ezgif.com for quick online resizing: Ezgif.com provides a user-friendly interface for resizing animated GIFs online. It offers options for maintaining aspect ratio and adjusting dimensions, making it perfect for quick edits.
- Experiment with Gifski: Gifski is an open-source, high-quality GIF encoder available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's known for producing smaller file sizes while maintaining high visual quality.
- Utilise Gifsicle for command-line optimisation: Tech-savvy users can leverage Gifsicle, a powerful command-line tool for optimising GIFs. It offers advanced features like frame combination and colour reduction.
- Consider Cloudinary for automated optimisation: Cloudinary's API and dashboard provide automatic GIF optimisation. It can intelligently resize, compress, and even convert GIFs to more efficient formats like WebP on-the-fly.
- Explore ImageOptim for batch processing: ImageOptim is a free, open-source tool available for macOS that can optimise multiple GIFs at once. It applies various optimisation techniques automatically and has a user-friendly interface.
- Use FFmpeg for video-to-GIF conversion: When creating GIFs from videos, use FFmpeg to generate optimised GIFs directly. It offers fine-grained control over frame rate, dimensions, and colour palettes.
- Leverage Compress-Or-Die for advanced GIF compression: Compress-Or-Die offers a specialised GIF compression tool that provides granular control over optimisation settings. It allows you to adjust lossy compression, colour reduction, and even provides a side-by-side comparison of the original and optimised GIFs.
