Crop a GIF online for free — drag the crop box or snap to 1:1, 16:9 and platform sizes. An edit to an animated GIF saves a still of its first frame.
GIF was released by CompuServe on June 15, 1987 and is still the universal format for short, looping, autoplay animations on social, chat, and email. The format caps each frame at a 256-color palette and uses LZW compression, so file size grows linearly with frame count and pixel area — in a full animated re-encode, every pixel you crop away saves bytes on every frame. Common reasons to crop:
Note the editor's output is a still image of the cropped frame. XConvert doesn't currently offer a crop that re-encodes the whole animation; Compress GIF can rescale, palette-reduce, and frame-drop an animated GIF, but its levers apply to the full canvas rather than a cropped region.
| Property | GIF | WebP (animated) | APNG |
|---|---|---|---|
| Released | 1987 (CompuServe) | 2010 (Google) | 2008 (Mozilla) |
| Max colors per frame | 256 | 16.7M (24-bit) + alpha | 16.7M (24-bit) + alpha |
| Compression | LZW (lossless palette) | VP8 lossy or lossless | DEFLATE (lossless) |
| Transparency | 1-bit (on/off) | 8-bit alpha | 8-bit alpha |
| Typical size vs GIF | baseline | 20-50% smaller | similar or larger |
| Browser support | Universal | Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari 16+ (~96%) | All modern browsers |
| Twitter/X autoplay | Yes (converted to MP4 server-side) | No | No |
| Discord autoplay | Yes (incl. emoji <256 KB) | Static frame only as emoji | No |
If file size is the goal and your audience is on modern browsers, convert GIF to WebP or convert GIF to MP4 — both typically cut size by 60-90% vs the same animation as GIF.
| Use case | Aspect ratio | Common output size |
|---|---|---|
| Discord emoji / avatar | 1:1 | 128×128 |
| Slack / Discord server icon | 1:1 | 512×512 |
| Twitter/X feed image (landscape) | 16:9 | 1280×720 |
| Twitter/X feed image (square) | 1:1 | 1080×1080 |
| Reaction still in chat | 4:3 or 16:9 | 480×360 / 480×270 |
| Facebook cover | 851:315 (platform size) | 851×315 |
No. The editor crops the GIF as a still image: it works on the first frame and saves it as a still GIF by default, or as PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP, TIFF, ICO, AVIF, PSD or PPM if you change Save as. The editor says so as soon as an animated GIF opens ("an edit here keeps only the first frame"); downloading the file without an edit gives back your original animated GIF. If what you need is a smaller animated GIF rather than a reframed one, Compress GIF rescales, palette-reduces, and frame-drops the whole animation while keeping it playing.
PNG is the safe default: lossless, and it keeps any transparency from the source frame. WebP gives a smaller file with the same alpha support in modern browsers. JPG is the smallest for photographic frames but flattens transparency. TIFF (lossless, Deflate-compressed) and BMP (uncompressed, no transparency) are picks for print or legacy pipelines.
Pick the 1:1 chip under "Aspect ratio" (or type equal W/H values under "Crop area"), position the box over the subject, then switch to the Resize tab and enter 128 × 128. Download as PNG. That covers static emoji and avatars; animated-emoji slots need an animated file, which this editor doesn't produce — for those, start from a source already framed square and shrink it with Compress GIF.
Yes: under "Shape", pick "Circle (avatar)". The result is saved as a square with transparent corners. GIF transparency is 1-bit (a pixel is either fully visible or fully transparent), so a circle saved as GIF has hard, jagged edges; save as PNG or WebP under "Save as" for a clean, smooth round avatar.
Yes — they're tabs of the same editor. Crop first, then open the Resize tab and scale the cropped frame with the W and H boxes under "Dimensions" or a "Percent of original" preset. There's also a standalone Resize GIF page that opens on the Resize tab directly.
There's no fixed cap on the editor — very large GIFs simply take longer to open and preview. Most GIFs in the wild are under 10 MB, and the platform limits you're usually aiming for (Twitter 15 MB, Discord free tier 20 MB) sit well below anything that would struggle. Long or high-resolution animations benefit more from converting to MP4 than from cropping alone.
Yes. Transparent pixels inside the crop box stay transparent — download as PNG or WebP to keep them (JPG has no alpha channel and will flatten the background). If you see edge artifacts, it's usually because the source GIF was already aliased against a specific background color; that fringe is baked into the pixels, not added by the crop.
Crop first, then resize. Cropping removes pixels at the source resolution; resizing afterwards downscales the smaller cropped frame. Doing it the other way wastes detail — you downscale pixels you're about to throw away. Both live in the same editor, so the order is just which tab you touch first.
Cropping changes the spatial dimensions (cuts pixels around the edges). Trimming changes the temporal dimension (cuts frames from the start or end of an animation). This editor crops; for shortening an animated GIF's duration, the frame-drop control in Compress GIF removes every 2nd through 10th frame while the loop keeps playing.
Yes — drop up to 50 GIF files at once (a mixed batch works too). The crop region (or aspect-ratio preset) you set applies to every file in the batch; "Download all (.zip)" saves every cropped result in one ZIP, or use "Download one by one" to save them separately.