#the gifs .. 70 frames... 15 mb .....

[sabrinaacarpenters]

Hi! I have a question regarding gifs and tumblr, if you don't mind answering.

I've recently started making gifs and I have noticed that tumblr doesn't let you upload gifs of more than 10mb size. And the size depends on how big the gif is, not the number of pixels. The size also depends on how many frames there are in a gif. Like, say, 70 frames range at about 6 - 8mb if they're like, 800 × 800. (I can't remember exactly, but approximately). So, my question is this: how do you choose the number of frames? Like, for some gifs, it just requires all the scenes, and I don't want to cut down on the frames, and I want a big gif. But then the gif is exceeding the 10mb limit and I also don't want that. So, basically, I just wanted to ask — how do you make a gif exactly how you want it and post it here?

Hi! There are a few tricks that you can use to make sure your gif fits the size limit:

Your gif's width should always be 540px!! That's super important, tumblr will always display your posts in that dimension, so it doesn't matter if you make it bigger, the quality won't be better. The height is up to you, my gifs range from 380px to 450px in height.

However a 540x450px gif's size with the same number of frames is significantly larger than a 540x380px one. So if you want your gif to have more frames you can always make your gif shorter

Black and white gifs are smaller, so if you really need every frame and you don't want to ruin the quality, make a black and white set instead of a vibrant colorful one.

Lossy: when you go to save your gif you can see this option on the right side panel. By increasing the amount of lossy your gif's size will decrease, however the higher the number is the more grainy your gif will be, so use this sparingly.

example for lossy under the cut

this gif with 0 lossy is 6.164 MB

and here it is with 15 lossy and it's 4.823 MB

You can see that the gif is not as smooth, and the colors aren't as vibrant, but if you use lossy on all your gifs in a set then it's not that noticeable!

Unfortunately sometimes we just have to split a scene in half, or sacrifice a few frames in the beginning/ending, but I hope this helped! Happy gifmaking <3