GIFs are eye-catching files that can make a website more fun; however, they are usually very large files (ie they take up a lot of space). Therefore, optimize your GIF file for your website, so that it is easier to load and can load faster.
What is a GIF?
A 'Data Interchange Format' (GIF) is a type of color video or animation format widely used on the web. They can be created by various programs, such as creating a GIF or animated image with Google Photos and with web pages such as 3D Text Maker.
Nowadays GIFs are a fundamental part of the banners of many web pages, as well as of their content; and we also have them at our fingertips on many social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.
Steps to reduce the size of a GIF file
In this section we will explain how to optimize or reduce the size of a GIF file to upload it to the web faster and more conveniently. It is a simple task that we can do in two ways: using an image editing program, such as Photoshop; or by using a GIF editing web page, as we will discuss below.
Optimize a GIF file using Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a very versatile tool and the compression process or reducing the size of a GIF file inside it is quite simple. Also, it allows us to change the file size as much as we want. If you don't have this program on your computer, it won't be a hindrance, because we can use and edit photos in Photoshop without downloading it, online and for free. The steps we need to follow are:
- Open the GIF we want modificare in Photoshop.
- Go to the 'File' menu, choose the 'Export' option and, in this menu, the 'Save for Web' option.
- This will open a menu where we can change «Image colors and size» to reduce the size of the GIF. For example, if the 'Colors' box contains 256, we can lower it to 128 or 64; and we can also reduce the number of pixels in the "Size" box. In the lower left corner of the screen we can see how much this changes the file size.
- Another alternative is to change the percentage of the bars in the menu 'Fit for web and less quality', but we must be careful, as this can greatly affect the quality of the GIF (although it also greatly reduces its size).
- Once satisfied with the result, we just have to select the 'Save ...' option and choose the destination path of the already modified file.
Optimize your GIF file using a web page
If you're not comfortable with Photoshop, there are several online tools that allow us to reduce the size of a GIF without reduce the quality. One of them is Ezgif, a free online GIF maker where we can edit these files to add text, speed up the speed of an animated GIF and of course change its size, so we need to follow these steps:
- Let's open Ezgif.com on the computer and go to the 'GIF Optimize' tab.
- Click on 'Select file', choose the GIF we want to optimize (if you haven't saved the GIF, you can paste the web URL) and press the 'Upload' button to open it.
- Once loaded, we can see the GIF and a series of parameters that we can modify. To reduce the size, we go to the compression level bar and move it as much as we want to optimize the GIF (remembering that this can change the quality).
- When we are satisfied, we press the button " Optimize your GIF file »To see the final result, then we save it by pressing the« Save »button.
Then a optimize your GIF file for your website, so that the user can enjoy your content in a faster and more comfortable way. And they are so ingrained in our daily life that we can even create and send animated GIFs on WhatsApp to all our friends.
May this article be useful for you to create your own GIF and you can enjoy this experience!
