How to compress a GIF under 8 MB for Discord

Discord limits uploads to 8 MB on free accounts, 50 MB with Nitro Basic and 500 MB with full Nitro. Most GIFs recorded from a screen or exported from a video editor land between 10 and 40 MB, which is why the upload fails.

A GIF is not compressed the way a photo is. It stores every frame as a separate image with its own color palette, so file size is driven by three things: how many frames there are, how many colors each frame uses, and how large the picture is. Lowering any of them shrinks the file.

The fastest route

1. Open the GIF compressor and drop your file in.
2. Set quality to about 50 percent. This cuts the palette to 128 colors and the frame rate to 12 per second, which is invisible on most screen recordings.
3. Convert and look at the new size shown next to the file name.
4. If it is still above 8 MB, set scale to 75 percent and convert again. At 50 percent scale you will always get there.

Which setting to lower first

Start with quality, not size. Dropping from 256 to 128 colors typically removes 30 to 40 percent of the file and is almost impossible to notice on interface recordings, text or flat illustration. Photographic GIFs with gradients and skin tones are the exception: they band visibly below about 96 colors, so on those reduce the scale instead.

Frame rate is the second lever. Anything above 15 frames per second is wasted on a GIF, because most chat clients cap playback there anyway. The compressor lowers frame rate automatically as you reduce quality, which is why the size drops faster than you would expect.

Scale is the last resort but the most powerful one. Halving the width and height removes roughly three quarters of the pixels, so a 20 MB GIF usually lands near 5 MB at 50 percent scale. On a phone screen nobody notices.

The better answer: send an MP4

Discord plays MP4 files inline, looping and muted, exactly like a GIF. The same animation as MP4 is typically 5 to 10 times smaller, because video codecs compress across frames instead of storing each one whole. A 24 MB GIF becomes a 2 MB MP4 with better colors.

The only trade-off is that an MP4 will not work where a true image file is required, for example some forum signatures and older email clients. For Discord, Slack, Telegram and WhatsApp, MP4 is the better choice every time.

Common mistakes

• Cropping instead of scaling. Cropping removes content but keeps the same pixel density, so the saving is smaller than you expect.
• Compressing an already compressed GIF twice. The second pass adds artifacts and saves very little, because the palette has already been reduced.
• Exporting a GIF from a video editor at 30 frames per second. Set the export to 12 to 15 and you often skip the compression step entirely.

Everything here runs in your browser. Your GIF is never uploaded to a server, so there is no queue and no size limit imposed by us.