How to crop an animated GIF
- Open the animated GIF — drop it here, choose it, or paste it. The panel reads every frame and shows the frame count, length and loop setting.
- Drag the crop box. The small player in the panel plays the cropped animation, so you can check that the moving part stays inside.
- Keep the crop a plain rectangle to keep every colour exactly. Add a shape, a size or a rotation only if you need one; the panel says when that rebuilds the colours.
- Press Crop Picture. The new GIF has the same number of frames, the same delays and the same loop count.
- Download it, or share it straight into a chat from your phone.
Why the colours stay exactly the same
A GIF stores each frame as numbers that point into a colour table of at most 256 entries. Many croppers turn every frame into full-colour pixels, crop them, and then squeeze them back into 256 colours — which changes shades and adds speckled dithering, especially on gradients and skin. CropPicture does not do that for a rectangular crop. It reads each frame’s rectangle, keeps only the part inside your crop, and writes those same numbers back with the frame’s own colour table. No pixel changes colour, so the result looks exactly like the matching part of the original.
Disposal settings — how a frame is cleared before the next one is drawn — are kept for every frame. Inside your crop they behave exactly as they did in the full picture, so animations built from small changing patches still play correctly.
When the colours have to be rebuilt
A shape mask, a different output size, a rotation or a straightened horizon all create pixels that were never in the original palette. For those, each frame is rendered through the same crop as a still picture and its colours are rebuilt: exactly, when the frame still has 255 colours or fewer, otherwise by reducing it to the 255 most representative colours without dithering. The panel warns before export and the result lists how many frames kept exact colours.
For a still picture cut from a GIF, open it in crop image and untick “Crop every frame”.
Frequently asked questions
Does cropping a GIF here keep the animation?
Yes. Every frame is cropped, not just the first. The frame count, each frame’s delay and the loop count are copied into the new file.
Will the colours change?
Not for a plain rectangle. Each frame keeps its own colour table and pixel values — the frames are cut and re-compressed with no new dithering. Shapes, resizing, rotation and straightening need new colours, and the panel tells you before you export.
What happens to frames outside the crop?
A frame that only changes pixels outside your crop becomes a single transparent pixel with its original delay, so the animation’s timing stays exactly the same.
Is the GIF uploaded anywhere?
No. The GIF is read and written by code running in this tab; nothing about it is sent anywhere. See privacy.
Can I crop animated WebP or APNG files?
Not frame by frame yet: animated WebP and APNG open, but only their first frame is cropped — the panel says so when it happens.
Why is my cropped GIF not much smaller?
GIF size depends on how much changes between frames, not only on area. A crop that keeps the moving part keeps most of the data; the panel shows an estimate first.