Editing GIFs can be a bit tricky. They’re animated so they work kind of like a video, but they are, in fact, an image format. The name itself is an abbreviation of Graphics Interchange Format. Normally, you’d need to use a professional video editing program like Adobe Photoshop in order to resize GIF files.
In this article, however, we’re going to offer you an easier, free alternative. We’ll show you how you can use Flixier to resize GIFs online. This tool is free to use and runs entirely in your web browser, so you don’t need to worry about installing or downloading anything to your computer. In fact, you don’t even need to create an account in order to try it out. Let’s see how it works!
How to resize GIF images online
- Open Flixier and import your GIF
Start by going over to Flixier’s website. Click the big Get Started button in the top right corner of the screen to open the editor up in your web browser. You’ll be greeted by a menu asking you to upload your GIF. You can drag it over from your computer, bring it over from a cloud storage service Dropbox or Google Photos.
Keep in mind that Flixier also has a built-in GIPHY integration, so if the GIF you want to resize is already on the platform, you can just close this menu entirely, open the Stock tab on the left side of the screen, select GIFs and search for it there.
- Resize your GIF file
To resize an animated GIF, drag it down to the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Then, click on the empty space next to the canvas to open the Settings menu. This is where you’ll be able to modify the size of your video’s canvas. You can choose from our presets, or type in a custom resolution.
The presets are optimized for videos, so they’re way too large for a GIF. We recommend using the manual option and typing in a resolution that you think is more appropriate for your needs.
After you resize the canvas, you can drag the GIF back to the center of the screen and resize it quickly with the Fit Canvas and Fill Canvas buttons.
- Save your resized GIF
When you’re done changing the size of your GIF, click the Export button in the top right corner to save it to your computer. Make sure to select GIF in the Save As drop-down list and you’re good to go! Flixier will take a few seconds to process it and then it will be downloaded to your computer.
Changing a GIF’s file size
Despite being image files, GIFs are a very poorly optimized format. Oftentimes, even short GIFs will have large file sizes that make them impossible to send over instant messaging apps or embed on a website. Here are a few of the things you can do to lower the file size of your GIF:
- Lower the resolution – If you made it this far into the article, you already know how to do this. Just follow the steps above and you’ll be able to easily lower the resolution of your GIF.
- Lower the framerate – When you export a GIF with Flixier, you can use the advanced export options to choose a new framerate. Lower the framerate is an amazing way to make your GIF smaller without reducing its sharpness. Just make sure not to lower it too much! If your GIF features a lot of dynamic action and you lower the framerate to something like 15, it will look choppy!
- Convert it to MP4 – We know this is counter-intuitive, but MP4 videos are a lot smaller than GIFs! If your use case allows for it, consider converting your GIF to MP4 in order to save space without reducing the visual quality in any way. You can do this easily with Flixier by selecting Video from the Save As drop-down list.
Thank you for reading this far! We hope you found this helpful. Now that you know how to do it, head over and start resizing your GIFs! It’s free!
