A GIF that's too large gets rejected on upload or converted to video automatically. Keeping within each platform's practical limits means your GIF plays the way you intended.
Rough limits to aim for
- Discord: 8 MB on a free server, so keep GIFs well under that. A width of 480px is usually plenty.
- Slack: uploads are generous, but a GIF under a few MB embeds and plays more reliably.
- Twitter/X: converts larger GIFs to video; keeping it small and short (under ~5 MB, a few seconds) keeps it snappy.
- Email: stay under 1–2 MB so it doesn't clog inboxes or get stripped.
Dimensions matter most
You rarely need a GIF wider than 480–600px — it's displayed small anyway. Scale it down with Resize GIF and you'll often cut the file size by more than half without any visible loss.
A reliable recipe
- Trim to the essential moment (2–4 seconds).
- Resize to around 480px wide.
- Compress to shave off the rest.
That combination clears every platform limit above while keeping the GIF sharp. If a place accepts video, GIF to MP4 is smaller still.