How to make a GIF small enough to send

A five-second screen recording turns into a 20 MB GIF and then bounces off every upload limit you meet. The format is from 1987 and it shows: every frame is stored as its own image, with no compression between frames.

Why GIFs are enormous

An MP4 stores the differences between frames — a talking head on a static background costs almost nothing after the first frame. A GIF has no idea what a previous frame was. Thirty frames per second means thirty full images per second, each limited to 256 colours.

That gives you three levers, and they are the only ones that matter:

• Frame rate. Going from 30 to 12 fps removes 60% of the data. Most GIFs look fine at 10–15 fps.
• Dimensions. Halving the width quarters the pixel count.
• Palette. 64 colours instead of 256, chosen for that specific animation, cuts size again.

Shrink it

1. Open Compress GIF and pick a level — Medium (12 fps, 75% size, 128 colours) suits most recordings.
2. Drop the GIF in. FFmpeg runs in your browser: one pass builds a palette tuned to your animation, the second re-encodes against it.
3. Download. A typical screen recording drops 60–80%.

Heavy is for hard limits — 10 MB Discord, old forums, email. It halves the dimensions and cuts to 64 colours, so gradients band, but flat UI recordings and screencasts survive it well.

The better answer, when you are allowed

If the destination accepts video, send an MP4. The same five seconds that cost 20 MB as a GIF costs 400 KB as H.264, in full colour at full frame rate. Slack, Discord, Telegram and every modern forum autoplay short videos exactly like GIFs.

Only converting to GIF when you must — an email signature, a README on an old host, a platform that strips video — is the real fix.