Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Optimizing Animated GIFs

As with any file served over the Web, it is important to keep animated GIFs as small as possible. I highly recommend reading “Optimizing Animated GIFs,” an article and tutorial by Andrew King in http://www.WebReference.com, from which many of the following tips were summarized (with permission). You can find it at http://www.webreference.com/dev/gifanim/index.html. It is a little dated, but it is still an excellent starting point for understanding how GIF animations work and the tools available for optimizing them.