Crop an animated GIF without losing the animation
Cropping a GIF means cropping every one of its frames, not just the picture you see first. This cropper cuts every frame of the animation to the same area and writes a new animated GIF.
- Upload the GIF (animated WebP and animated PNG work too).
- Draw the area to keep, or choose an exact shape such as square or 16:9.
- Click Crop and download the new GIF.
What is kept
- Timing: each frame keeps its own display time, so the animation plays at the same speed.
- Loop count: a GIF that loops forever still loops forever; one that plays three times still plays three times.
- Colours: GIF frames have at most 256 colours. When a cropped frame still fits in 256 colours, which is almost always the case, its colours are kept exactly. Otherwise a new palette is chosen for that frame, with dithering.
- Transparency: see-through areas stay see-through.
Only the part of each frame that changes from the previous one is stored, which keeps the new file small.
Good to know
- To make the GIF smaller in pixels as well, set “Then shrink to” under “More options”.
- Saving an animated GIF as JPEG keeps only the first frame, because JPEG can't hold an animation. Choose WebP or PNG instead to keep it moving in a more modern format.
- Frames stored with a delay browsers don't honour (0 or 10 ms) are shown for 100 ms by browsers; the cropped GIF is saved with that 100 ms delay so it plays the same everywhere.
- To make a GIF faster, slower, reversed or smaller in KB, use the GIF Editor and the GIF Compressor after cropping.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Image Cropper.