Make a small tweet GIF
The GIF you just made is 20MB and the chat app refused it. That is normal: GIF has no inter-frame compression, so the file grows almost linearly with frames multiplied by pixels, and a casual export blows past every upload limit GIF exists to serve.
Paste a link above to see the preview here.
The card keeps the author's name, handle and timestamp so your export credits them. The post itself still belongs to whoever wrote it, so check you have the right to reuse it before you publish.
This page attacks all three levers at once: a 64-colour palette instead of 256, 10 frames per second instead of 30, and a short clip. A flat tweet card survives palette reduction almost invisibly, because there are no photographic gradients to band.
Questions
- How do I make a GIF smaller?
- Cut the frame rate first, then the length, then the dimensions. Halving the frame rate roughly halves the file.
- Does reducing colours hurt quality?
- Barely, for a flat tweet card. 64 colours is plenty without photographic gradients. Tweets containing photos need more.
- Why not just use MP4?
- Use MP4 where it plays. GIF exists for places that autoplay images but not video, like some forums and email clients.