How to change the mb size of a gif

I have not seen a reliable way to reduce file size of an animated GIF when exporting directly from Premiere Pro or Adobe Media Encoder. They just don’t provide enough detailed control over animated GIF options. All they offer is just one Quality slider.

If that Quality slider doesn’t reduce the size enough, try these:

• Reduce the duration.
• Reduce the frame size (pixel dimensions).
• Reduce the frame rate.

These can all be done in the Export Settings dialog box for Premiere Pro or Media Encoder.

If the animated GIF still isn’t small enough, you have exhausted what the Adobe video applications can do here, so you have to get it done in Photoshop:

1. Export as a regular video file.
2. Open that in Photoshop.
3. Open the Timeline panel (Window > Timeline), and in the Timeline panel menu, choose Set Timeline Frame Rate. Lower that frame rate as much as you can tolerate.
4. Choose File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy).
5. Set the export file type to GIF. That displays the GIF optimization controls.
6. Now apply standard GIF optimization techniques, which I won’t go into in detail but are things like:

• Reduce the number of colors in the GIF palette. Lock important colors if needed.
• Reduce the amount of dithering.
• Reduce the frame size (pixel dimensions).

Watch the estimated file size in the bottom left corner to see which changes reduce the file size the most.

Making adjustments may be slow because Save for Web (Legacy) is very old code. But for now, this is the only good place to properly optimize an animated GIF in Adobe software, that I know of.

If these changes compromise the quality of the video too much, you have run into the limitations of the creaky old 1990s animated GIF format, which was never designed for continuous tone video. If nothing gets the file size down far enough, that means you should post it somewhere as a normal video, and embed that into the Twitter post.

(Another alternative: See my post further down about the Gifski app, which works better than anything Adobe has.)

(Edit, 2024) Another alternative recently came out from Adobe: Use the Convert to GIF feature that’s part of the Adobe Express online service. You can use it directly from the Quick Actions panel in Adobe Bridge 2025 or later, or at the Adobe Express Convert to GIF web page. The problem with this is that the are only options are size/quality (Small, Medium, Large), aspect ratio, and trimming, so it might not have enough optimization options for the file size/quality balance you need.