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:
Export as a regular video file.
Open that in Photoshop.
Open the Timeline panel (Window > Timeline), and in the Timeline panel menu, choose Set Timeline Frame Rate. Lower that as far as you can stand.
Choose File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy).
Set the export file type to GIF. That displays the GIF optimization controls.
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.)
Your solution works. Ain't no way you can reduce the file size in Adobe Media Encoder effectively. I exported it is a .mp4 and used Photoshop to convert it to a smaller .gif using the save for web(legacy) format. Danke!
Another solution that has helped me is the Gifski app. That link is to the Mac version which I use, but there is a Windows app here.
Gifski provides more control than Premiere Pro or Adobe Media Encoder, and is able to create much smaller animated GIF files. It has fewer manual controls than Save for Web (Legacy) in Photoshop, but the way Gifski works creates better-looking video at a smaller size, without having to spend a lot of time hand-tweaking the GIF color palette.
I moved this to the Ideas forum. If you are struggling with this issue, as well, please upvote this feature request. Upvoting this feature request will put this issue on the product team's radar, so please do so.
Hi! I had the same problem. If you created the gif in procreate and toggle on "web ready" before exporting it, it greatly reduces the file size. Not sure if that will help.