Resize an Animated GIF

Animated GIFs are images but you can't really handle them link other types of images, like PNGs or JPEGs or even WebPs.  GIFs are kind of a video file, because they have frames, but there's no real control over how they play or loop.  My favorite image manipulation utility, ImageMagick, doesn't seem to be the best utility for animated GIFs -- another utility called gifsicle is as good as it gets. I showed you how to merge and optimize animated GIFs with gifsicle, and now let's look at resizing animated GIFs.

If you try to use ImageMagick's basic resize functionality, you'll end up getting the first frame output to the correct size.  That's nice but you want to keep the GIF animated, right?  Here are a few easy methods for resizing a GIF with gifsicle:

# Scaling of an image - 50%
gifsicle --scale 0.5 -i animation.gif > animation-smaller.gif

# Scale to a given width with unspecified height
gifsicle --resize-fit-width 300 -i animation.gif > animation-300px.gif

# Scale to a given height with unspecified width
gifsicle --resize-fit-height 100 -i animation.gif > animation-100px.gif

# Clip to size
gifsicle --resize 300x200  -i animation.gif > animation-clipped.gif

You can use scale to easily scale an image by a given factor, but you can also use --resize-fit-height or --resize-fit-width to scale to respective sizes.  You can also clip with --resize.  The output stays animated and you have your animated GIF at the desired size!