GIF Speed Changer

How to use the gif speed changer

1. Choose a GIF.
2. Set a speed multiplier, and drop frames if you need it faster still.
3. Rebuild and download.

About this tool

Speed in a GIF is not a frame rate. Each frame carries its own delay in hundredths of a second, so changing speed means scaling every delay — and that runs into a limit nobody documents on the tin: browsers clamp very short delays, historically treating 0 or 1 hundredths as 10. A GIF asking to play at 100 frames per second therefore plays at 10, which is why an animation sped up aggressively in most tools simply stops getting faster.

Past that point the only way to go faster is to show fewer frames, which is what the frame control does: keeping every second or third frame and adding the dropped frames' time to the one kept, so the duration falls without the delays hitting the floor.

Slowing down has no such limit and is straightforwardly useful — a fast animation at quarter speed is often the only way to see what actually happens in it.

Browsers display animated GIFs and offer no way to read their frames — draw one to a canvas and you get the first frame only. The GIF is therefore decoded by an implementation on this page: header, colour table, LZW-compressed image data, and the disposal model that composes each frame onto the last. That last part is the one usually skipped, and skipping it is why frames come out of some tools with holes in them, since most GIFs store only the pixels that changed between frames.

Common uses

• Slowing a fast animation down to see what happens.
• Speeding up a long screen recording.
• Fixing a GIF exported at the wrong speed.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my GIF stop getting faster?

Because browsers clamp very short frame delays, historically treating anything under about 2 hundredths of a second as 10. Past that point, going faster means dropping frames.

Does dropping frames lose the ending?

No. The time from dropped frames is added to the frame that is kept, so the animation covers the same action in less time.

Is there a limit to slowing down?

Not a practical one. Delays are stored in hundredths of a second and can be long, so a quarter-speed animation plays exactly as you would expect.