All modern browsers support MP4 videos, so now is an ideal time to convert those GIFs to MP4.Īn easy way to do this is to use a solution like FFmpeg. Aside from their smaller file size, MP4 videos look better than other alternatives since the format was designed for streaming video. Converting your animated GIFs to MP4 videos can make your files up to 95 percent smaller. Since the HTML5 video tag gave browsers the ability to play videos without the need for external plugins, MP4 has become the preferred multimedia container format of most web developers. Here are some alternatives to GIF to consider: 1.
Fortunately, you have plenty of options regardless of your preference. There is a debate among web developers whether or not animated image formats should be ditched altogether in favor of video formats. If you have a lot of GIF files on your website, it might make more sense to convert them all to a more performant alternative. Alternative formats to speed up GIF animations Running your GIFs through a compression tool like EzGIF can reduce their file sizes by 30-50 percent without affecting the visual quality too drastically. Fortunately, the human eye isn't very good at noticing subtle color differences, so your users might not even be able to tell the difference.Īlthough the term "lossy compression" carries a negative connotation, sometimes reducing the quality of an image is worth the performance boost. In other words, optimizing your animated GIFs for speed often means sacrificing image quality. Speed up GIF animations with compression toolsĭue to their nature, it's not possible to make changes to GIF files without affecting their graphical data. Most GIF editing tools allow you to experiment with transparency settings. Making parts of each frame transparent is an effective cost saving method for images with large unchanging areas, but it can ruin busier animations. You can experiment with different options to find the best compromise between file size and image quality. Try decreasing the number of colors per frame. If you don't want to manually remove frames, you can use an editing tool to automatically drop every second, third or fourth frame from an animation to reduce the file size. Use a GIF editing tool to eliminate some frames and lower the file size.
You may not necessarily need every frame of an animation.
#SPEED UP GIF ANIMATIONS FREE#
Fortunately, there are plenty of free editing tools that streamline the process. Since animated GIFs are just collections of static GIF images, you'll have to edit each individual image to decrease the overall size of the animated file. Smaller images load faster than big ones, so decreasing the dimensions of you GIFs can result in minor savings. Each one can be done with the help of the online tool EzGIF. If you only have a few GIF files that you're particularly attached to, then it may be worth the effort to try the following techniques. You should also think about supporting newer formats like WebP. If your website uses a lot of static GIF images, consider converting them to the PNG format to easily shave off 5-25 percent of each file's size. While GIF animations still have some value, there is no reason to use GIFs for static images these days. If users have to wait longer for an animated GIF to load than the actual length of the animation, then they are likely to be disappointed and tempted to hit their browser's back button. A GIF that lasts only a few seconds can be several megabytes in size, which means that visitors with slower internet connections could be looking at a blank page for a few seconds before it loads. Even if you're happy with how your website is performing, you may not realize how much weight your GIFs are adding to each page. That said, just because GIFs are easy to use doesn't make them ideal for websites. Although we now have several superior alternatives for displaying animations, people are comfortable with GIF, and GIF animations are still extremely easy to make. It was never meant to be an animation tool, yet people have been using it for that purpose for the past three decades. GIFs were invented in 1987 as a way to transmit multiple images that share the same metadata in a single file. Let's cover some ways to speed up GIF animations on your website and look at some alternative formats that you should consider. That said, GIFs can drag down a web page's performance, especially if not optimized. Thanks to their simplicity and widespread support, GIF files remain wildly popular despite the dozens of other image and video formats available today. The graphics interchange format, better known as GIF, has been around for longer than the World Wide Web itself.
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