How to Change Animated GIF Speed

Comedians would tell you that timing is the most important part of any joke. The same could be said about animated GIFs; whether they're used as a meme or to illustrate a process, the speed of an animated GIF can effect its effectiveness. With that idea in mind, I set about trying to figure out how to modify the speed of an animated GIF; let's explore it!

Let's use the following GIF as our sample:

The first step in modifying a GIF's speed is determining the GIF's root speed; to determine this ratio, we'll use ImageMagick's identify command:

identify -verbose respect.gif | grep Delay
> Delay: 5x100
> Delay: 5x100

The ratio returned represents the hundredths of a second between the animated GIF's frames.

To speed up the animation, we can use a smaller ratio:

convert -delay 1x30 respect.gif respect-fast.gif

To slow down the, we can use a larger ratio:

convert -delay 1x100 respect.gif respect-slow.gif

Animated GIFs still have a place on the web; optimizing their effectiveness remains important. If you need to speed up or slow down an animated GIF, look no further than ImageMagick!