Stage 06 · roll the film
GIF maker
Put your frames in order, set how long each one shows and how many times it loops, and get an animated GIF with crisp, unblurred pixels.
Drop your frames
PNG, GIF, WebP or JPEG images, one per frame. They are sorted by file name, and you can reorder them.
Frames
Preview
Making a good pixel art GIF
Add your frames in one go; they are sorted by file name, so walk_01.png comes before walk_02.png. Reorder them with the arrow buttons, duplicate a frame to hold a pose longer, or give a single frame its own delay, for example a longer pause on the last frame of a blink. The preview plays exactly the timing that will be saved.
Scale enlarges every pixel into a square block without smoothing, so a 32 × 32 sprite at 4× becomes a sharp 128 × 128 GIF; many sites blur small images when they enlarge them, so a scaled-up GIF looks much better in posts. Loop sets whether the animation repeats forever, plays once, or plays a set number of times.
GIF frames can have up to 256 colours and only on-or-off transparency. When your frames fit, which pixel art nearly always does, the maker builds one shared palette from the exact colours used, so nothing changes. Photos and gradients are reduced to the best 256 colours for the whole animation.
Questions
Why does my fast GIF play slowly?
GIF stores delays in hundredths of a second, and most browsers treat a delay of 0 or 10 ms as 100 ms to stop runaway animations. 20 ms per frame (50 frames per second) is the fastest that plays as set, and pixel art usually looks best at 80 to 150 ms.
Will my colours change?
Not if all your frames together use 256 colours or fewer, counting transparency as one, which is true of almost all pixel art: then every pixel is stored exactly. With more colours, such as photos, the maker picks the best 256 for the whole animation, so some gradients will band.
Can a GIF have soft, half-transparent edges?
No. A GIF pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque, so pixels that are less than half opaque become transparent and the rest solid. If soft edges look jagged, untick Keep transparency and choose a background colour that matches where the GIF will be shown.
What happens to frames of different sizes?
The GIF takes the size of the largest frame, and smaller frames are centred on it. For a steady animation, make all frames the same size first, for example by slicing them from one sprite sheet.