WhatsApp GIF Size: How Big, What Format and What Actually Happens

What WhatsApp does to your GIF

In my experience the app re-encodes it. That means two things. First, the GIF's own file size matters less than you'd think, because it isn't what gets sent. Second, you're trusting WhatsApp's compression, which is tuned for speed over looks, to turn your carefully chosen colours into video.

If you start from a video instead, you skip one lossy step. An MP4 of a clip is also tiny next to the GIF of the same clip, so it uploads faster on a slow connection, which is the situation WhatsApp is most often used in.

The 16 MB limit and your clip

A few seconds of video almost never comes near 16 MB. You'd only hit it with a long screen recording or a high-resolution clip. If you do, trim it, lower the width, and use the "Size to fit" option on this site's Format tab with the 16 MB setting, which finds settings that fit.

Making it show as a GIF

WhatsApp's own video editor can mark a very short clip, around six seconds or less, as a GIF so it plays like one. So the simplest route for a phone user is to trim the video down to a few seconds first and let the app do the rest. It's an app feature, so what you see on your phone is the final word.

Animated stickers

Stickers are a different thing with strict rules. For animated stickers, the published requirements ask for WebP, 512 by 512 pixels, a file size of 500 KB or less, and a short duration of about ten seconds at most. Check WhatsApp's current sticker documentation before you build a pack, because those details are exactly the kind that change.

This site can make the animation as a small WebP, and it can crop to a square and remove a flat background. What it can't do is pad the result to an exact 512 by 512 canvas, so for that last step you'll need a sticker-maker app. Treat it as a way to get a light, clean animation to start from.