Small enough to send.

Make a GIF fit Discord's emoji and sticker limits, or any size you set, in your browser: fewer colours, frames or pixels, said plainly. Nothing is uploaded.

By Suraj Kumar1 November 20265 min read

A rocky coastline with a small house above turquoise water

Chat apps refuse animations over a set size, and a GIF made from a few seconds of video is often far over. The KeepSimp animation converter brings a GIF under a limit you choose, or one a destination publishes, in your browser, and tells you what it gave up to get there.

What makes a GIF heavy.

A GIF's size comes from three things: how many pixels each frame has, how many frames there are, and how many colours each frame uses. Halve the width and height and there are a quarter of the pixels. Drop from 30 frames a second to 15 and there are half the frames. Fewer colours pack smaller too.

So making a GIF smaller is always a choice between those three. A good tool makes it gently and says which it chose.

Set a limit and let it work.

Open the animation converter and add your GIF. Turn on Must be under a size? and choose 256 KB, 1 MB, 5 MB or 10 MB, or type your own under More options.

The converter first tries your settings as they are. If the file is too big, it steps down a ladder that lowers quality, then frame rate, then size, a little of each in turn, so the colours are not driven to their worst before the frame rate is touched. Every try is a real conversion, measured in bytes. The result says what changed, such as 64 colours, at most 15 frames a second, 85% of the size. If even the last step is too big, it says that too.

Discord emoji and stickers.

Discord's developer documentation gives emoji and animated emoji a maximum of 256 KiB, at 128 by 128 pixels. Its stickers have their own rules on its help pages: an animated sticker is an APNG of 320 by 320 pixels, up to 512 KB.

Under More options, Where is it going? has a preset for each: Discord emoji makes a GIF within 128 pixels under 256 KB, and Discord sticker makes an APNG of exactly 320 by 320 under 512 KB. Each names its source and the date it was checked.

Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram.

The converter has presets for Slack emoji and WhatsApp stickers too, but their figures come from guides, not from Slack's or WhatsApp's own pages, so the presets say they are reported. If an upload is refused, set a smaller limit by hand.

Telegram publishes its video sticker rules: a WebM in VP9, one side of 512 pixels, at most three seconds, 30 frames a second and 256 KB. The Telegram preset follows them. A browser that can only write VP8 makes a WebM Telegram may refuse, and the preset says so.

Help it by hand.

The surest savings are the ones you choose. Trim the animation to the part that matters with the two handles, cap the frame rate, and resize it to the size it will be shown at. Then the limit has less to take away.

A video plays far smaller than any GIF. Where a video is accepted, an MP4 of the same loop is often a tenth of the size.

A little less theory. A little more doing.

Try it on your own terms, with a free browser tool.

Try the tool