Reverse a GIF
Playing a GIF backwards turns a jump into a landing, water flowing uphill, or a build-up into a tear-down. This page opens the GIF editor with Play backwards already ticked.
- Upload the GIF (animated WebP and animated PNG work too).
- Click Apply.
- Download the reversed GIF.
What stays the same
- Every frame's timing. Each frame keeps its own display time, so pauses that were at the end of the original are now at the start.
- The loop count. A GIF that loops forever still loops forever.
- The colours. Reversing doesn't change any pixels, so the GIF's colours are kept exactly (as long as a frame's changing area has 255 colours or fewer, which is almost always the case).
- Transparency of transparent GIFs.
Why reversing a GIF isn't trivial
Most GIFs store only what changes from one frame to the next, and some erase or restore parts of the picture between frames. Simply putting the stored frames in the opposite order would leave broken, smeared pictures. The editor first draws every frame completely, reverses the complete frames, and then stores them again efficiently, so the reversed GIF plays cleanly.
Combine with other edits
Tick Boomerang instead to play forwards and then backwards in a loop, change the speed, or rotate and flip the animation at the same time. You can also save the result as animated WebP, which is usually much smaller than a GIF.
More about what this tool reads and writes: GIF Editor and Effects.