Reverse GIF

How to reverse a GIF

1. 1

   Open your animation

   Drag the GIF onto the box, click to pick one, or paste the address of one that is already online. Animated WebP, APNG and AVIF work too.

2. 2

   Choose the direction

   Backwards plays from the last frame to the first. Boomerang goes forward and then back for a bounce. Or keep the order as it is, when all you want is to change the speed.

3. 3

   Choose the speed

   From a quarter of the original pace to four times faster. The result tells you the new length before you convert, so you can tell whether you have gone too far.

4. 4

   Compare and download

   The new animation plays next to the original, both at their real speed, and one button downloads it.

What makes it different

• The boomerang does not stutter

  The way back skips the first and the last frame. If it did not, those two would appear twice in a row and stay on screen for double their time — a visible hitch at exactly the two moments your eye is watching. It is the detail that separates a good bounce from one that feels off without you knowing why.

• The speed is real, not a preview

  Each frame's duration is rewritten in the file, and rounded to what the GIF format can actually store. A tool that only speeds up its own preview gives you a file that plays at the original pace everywhere else.

• It tells you the new length first

  The frame count and the resulting duration are shown before converting, worked out with the very same functions that build the file — so what it promises and what you download cannot drift apart.

• Frame timings survive

  A GIF can hold a different duration for every frame, and reversing keeps each frame's own timing with it instead of flattening everything to one average speed.

• Nothing is uploaded

  The animation is decoded and rebuilt inside your browser. No file is sent to a server, there is no watermark and there is no account.

Supported formats

Animated GIF, animated WebP, APNG and animated AVIF go in; an animated GIF comes out, with the palette left at its maximum of 256 colours because the point here is not to shrink the file. If you also want it smaller, run the result through the GIF compressor.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is a boomerang GIF?

One that plays forward and then immediately backwards, so the motion bounces instead of jumping back to the start. It works especially well for short clips where the first and last frames do not match.

Why does the boomerang not simply repeat the animation reversed?

Because then the last frame would close the way out and open the way back, appearing twice in a row and lasting twice as long. Same for the first frame at the loop point. Skipping both is what makes the bounce read as continuous motion.

Will the file get bigger?

A boomerang has almost twice the frames, so yes, it roughly doubles. Reversing or changing the speed keeps the same frames, so the size stays close to the original — it is re-encoded, so it will not be byte for byte identical.

Why can I not pick any speed I like?

A GIF stores each frame's duration in hundredths of a second, so not every pace is representable. The offered multipliers land on values the format can hold, and each delay is rounded to that grid, which is what makes the promised speed the real one.

Does it lose quality?

A little, unavoidably: the animation is decoded and encoded again, and a GIF can only hold 256 colours per frame. The palette is left at that maximum here to lose as little as possible, since the goal is not to make the file smaller.

Can I reverse only part of it?

Not from this tool. Open the GIF in the GIF Splitter instead: it is the full editor, where you can delete frames, reorder them by dragging and change timings one by one.