How to Crop a GIF Online (Without Losing the Animation)

Use PixelTools' free crop tool to cut down an animated GIF without breaking the animation. Upload the GIF, drag the crop handles to select the area you want to keep, and apply the crop — every frame is cropped to that same area and the file is re-encoded as a new animated GIF, so it keeps playing exactly as before, just with the unwanted area removed. Everything runs in your browser: the GIF is never uploaded to a server, so it stays private and works even for GIFs with a lot of frames.

A typical online "image cropper" draws the GIF onto a canvas and exports whatever is showing at that instant — which is a single static frame, not the animation. To crop a GIF correctly without losing motion, a tool has to decode every frame, apply the same crop region to each one, and re-encode them back into a new animated GIF with the original timing intact. PixelTools' crop tool does this automatically the moment it detects an animated GIF — there's no separate "GIF mode" to switch on, it just works.

Free crop lets you draw any rectangle over the GIF's first frame as a preview, then applies that same rectangle to every frame. Use this to remove a watermark, cut out dead space, or isolate the part of the animation that matters — for example, trimming the borders off a screen-recording GIF.

Fixed aspect ratio constrains the crop to a set proportion (1:1, 16:9, 9:16, etc.) so the result fits a specific space — a chat preview, a square thumbnail, or a Stories-format placement. Since the crop is applied identically to every frame, the animation's framing stays consistent throughout, with no jitter between frames.

Both preserve animation with PixelTools, but they solve different problems. Cropping removes part of each frame — the remaining pixels are untouched, just cut down to a smaller area at the same resolution. Resizing keeps the full frame content but scales every pixel to a different dimension. If your GIF has unwanted content at the edges (padding, a watermark, part of another app in a screen recording), crop it out first. If the whole GIF is just too large in file size or dimensions, resize it. For a GIF that needs both framing fixed and a specific file size, crop first to get the right composition, then resize to hit your target dimensions.

Built-in tools on both operating systems generally cannot crop an animated GIF without collapsing it to a still image:

Mac — Preview: Preview's crop tool only operates on the first frame of a GIF and exports a static image, losing the animation entirely.

Windows — Photos app / Paint: Same limitation — both flatten an animated GIF to a single frame the moment you open the crop tool.

Because of this, cropping a GIF while keeping it animated genuinely requires a tool built to handle GIF frames specifically, which is why a frame-aware online tool is the more reliable option even for users who'd normally reach for a native app first.