For the Love of My Data Plan: Optimize The GIFs in Your Text Messages

Yes, I like animated GIFs.

And yes, I like using them as reactions in text messages.

But to put not too fine a point on it, they can be large. And so I use Gifsicle in order to optimize the images so that they don’t eat up too much bandwidth or hard drive space.

Gifsicle is a commandline utility (though it’s been ported to pretty much every OS out there), so I whipped up a quick script/batch file to help automate the process for you and put it up on GitHub at https://github.com/uriel1998/shiny-gif-disco

The settings I use, FWIW, are gifsicle -O3 –resize-fit 320×320. Trying to reduce the number of colors made things look really bad and didn’t do as much as I hoped in terms of file size savings.