A Lottie, playing as it was made.

Open a Lottie JSON, a .lottie or a .tgs in your browser, nothing uploaded: it plays as it is, with its size, frame rate and length, and can become a GIF.

By Suraj Kumar5 November 20265 min read

A Lottie is an animation saved as text: shapes, colours and keys written as JSON, which apps and websites play at any size. To see one you need a player. KeepSimp's Lottie viewer plays it in your browser, on your device, and nothing is uploaded.

What a Lottie file is.

A Lottie holds the instructions for an animation rather than its frames: where each shape is, its colour, and how it changes from key to key. A player draws it at whatever size the screen needs, so it stays sharp and the file stays small. The Lottie Animation Community publishes its specification, with a schema that says what a file may hold.

It comes in three wrappings. A .json file is the Lottie itself. A .lottie (dotLottie) file is a ZIP that holds one or more Lotties and the pictures they use. A Telegram .tgs sticker is a Lottie compressed with gzip.

Drop it and it plays.

Drop a .json, a .lottie (version 1 or 2) or a .tgs on the Lottie viewer. It plays as it is, drawn by ThorVG, an open-source engine, through LottieFiles' dotlottie-web player, both under the MIT licence, running in your browser.

Play and pause it, go to any moment, and see it over checks, white or dark, to judge its edges and its clear parts. The page shows its size, its frame rate and how long it lasts.

See what the editor would leave out.

A Lottie can use features KeepSimp's editor does not hold, such as expressions, masks, mattes, effects and text layers. The viewer plays them all, as ThorVG does, and names the ones the file uses, so you know before you choose to edit it.

Then choose what to do with it.

The viewer asks what you want to do. Make a video or GIF saves an MP4, a GIF, an animated WebP or a PNG of one frame. Change its colours lists every colour the file uses. Edit it opens it in the Animation maker. Save as another Lottie writes it as a Lottie JSON, a dotLottie or a Telegram sticker.

Every Lottie, dotLottie or sticker it writes is played back by ThorVG before you get it.

A little less theory. A little more doing.

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

Try the tool