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Change the speed of a GIF

Make a GIF faster or slower by changing its frame delays — all frames at once or just one frame. Without re-encoding the frames.

Updated 2026-10-26T00:00:00.000Z

A GIF has no “speed” setting. Every frame stores its own delay: how long it stays on screen before the next frame is drawn. To speed up or slow down a GIF you change those delays.

Delays are stored in centiseconds (cs) — hundredths of a second. 10 cs = 100 ms = 10 frames per second.

With the desktop app

  1. Open the GIF in GIFmeta. The frame list shows the delay of every frame.
  2. One frame: select it and change Delay in the viewer — handy to hold the last frame longer.
  3. All frames: go to ⚙️ Settings → Delay for all frames, type the new value and click Apply to all frames.
  4. Press ▶ Play — playback uses your edited delays, so you see the new speed before saving.
  5. 💾 Save writes a new file; the original stays untouched.

Changed delays are marked ● in the frame list, and the status bar shows the new total duration.

With the command line

# every frame 80 ms
gifmeta mod input.gif --delay 8 -o faster.gif

# only frame 0 → 50 ms and frame 5 → 2 s
gifmeta mod input.gif --delays 0=5,5=200 -o tuned.gif

# 150 ms for all, but frame 0 → 20 ms
gifmeta mod input.gif --delay 15 --delays 0=2 -o mixed.gif

Check the result with gifmeta info output.gif --show-frames.

Why changing speed is lossless

GIFmeta only rewrites the timing field of each frame. The pixels, palettes and optimization stay exactly as they were — no quality loss, no bigger file.

The 0 and 1 cs trap

Browsers show delays of 0 or 1 cs as 10 cs (100 ms), because very short delays used to be abused. A GIF “sped up” to 1 cs therefore plays slower than one at 2 cs. Use 2 cs (20 ms) as the fastest delay. The desktop app warns you when a frame will play slower than you asked.

Want a smoother speed-up?

Making every frame shorter has a limit. To speed up a long GIF further, delete every other frame — see Delete frames from a GIF. GIFmeta can merge the deleted delays into the previous frame or drop them.

Related guides

🔄Make a GIF loop foreverSet a GIF to loop infinitely, play a fixed number of times, or play just once — by changing its loop setting, without touching the frames.🗑️Delete frames from a GIFRemove frames from an animated GIF — even a frame-optimized one — without glitches. Dependent frames are rebuilt automatically.🔑Frame-optimized GIFs, explainedWhy most GIFs online store only the pixels that change, what keyframes, delta frames and disposal methods are — and why editing them usually breaks things.