How to Speed Up or Slow Down a GIF
Each frame in a GIF stores its own delay: how long to show it before moving on, in hundredths of a second. Changing a GIF's speed means changing those delays, nothing else.
Speeding up or slowing down
- Slower: multiply every delay. At 0.5× speed, a frame shown for 50 ms is now shown for 100 ms.
- Faster: divide every delay. At 2×, the same frame shows for 25 ms.
Because only the timing changes, the image data stays identical. The GIF speed changer rewrites the delay bytes in place, so there's no quality loss and the file size stays the same.
Why some GIFs won't go faster
Browsers don't play GIF frames faster than every 20 ms, which is 50 frames per second. Worse, a delay of 0 or 10 ms is treated as 100 ms, a leftover from early browsers that protected against GIFs that set no delay.
So if a GIF is already at 20 ms per frame, it can't speed up further by changing the timing. The only way to make it shorter is to remove frames. Our tool warns you when this happens.
Uneven timing
Some GIFs pause on a frame, for example on a punchline or the last slide. Scaling every delay by the same factor keeps those pauses in proportion, so the rhythm stays the same at the new speed.
Related edits
- Play it backwards, or as a forward-and-back boomerang, with reverse GIF.
- A faster GIF isn't a smaller GIF. To cut the file size, use the compressor.