On 13 August 2026 Discord doubled its free upload limit from 10 MB to 20 MB, so the Discord GIF size limit on a free account is now 20 MB. Many guides still quote 8, 10 or 25 MB. Every limit below names its source and the date it was checked.
Most rows are read from the same data file that Playcut's GIF compressor and GIF file size reducer use for their platform presets, so a change there shows up here too.
GIF size limits by platform (checked 30 September 2026)
Read the surface column first. Discord alone has five different limits, and a GIF that is fine in a message can be many times too big for an emoji.
| Platform | Surface | Published figure | Notes from the source | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discord | Message upload, free account | 20 MB | Raised from 10 MB on 13 August 2026. Mobile uploads are now measured before compression, as on desktop. | Discord on X | |
| Discord | Message upload, Nitro Basic | 50 MB | Unchanged by the August 2026 increase. | Dexerto, 13 Aug 2026 | |
| Discord | Message upload, Nitro | 500 MB | Unchanged by the August 2026 increase. | Dexerto, 13 Aug 2026 | |
| Discord | Custom emoji | 256 KB | 128 × 128 recommended. Discord compresses an emoji that is a bit bigger; using animated emoji needs Nitro. | Discord custom emoji guide | |
| Discord | Custom sticker | 512 KB | Exactly 320 × 320 px. PNG for still stickers, APNG or GIF for animated ones. | Discord sticker guide | |
| X (Twitter) | GIF in a post, web | 15 MB | 5 MB from mobile. One GIF per post, and it cannot share a post with other images. | X Help Center* | |
| Slack | Custom emoji | 128 KB | Slack's wording: square images under 128 KB “work best”. GIFs can include up to 50 frames. | Slack Help Center | |
| Tumblr | GIF in a post | 10 MB | Tumblr tries to compress an uncompressed GIF under 10 MB; a compressed GIF should be 5 MB or less. Under 3 MB is left uncompressed. | Tumblr Help Center | |
| Giphy | Upload | 100 MB | 8 MB or less recommended. Uploads are also capped at 15 seconds (6 or less recommended). | GIPHY Help Center* | |
| Newsletter body | 1 MB | A working rule, not a published limit. Outlook for Windows 2007–2019 does not animate GIFs. | caniemail (rule of thumb) |
* X's and GIPHY's help centres refuse automated requests, so they are named rather than linked. Both figures were checked against the indexed text of their help articles on 30 September 2026. Reddit is left out on purpose: the Reddit help pages we checked publish no GIF size figure.
Discord GIF size limit
Discord has several GIF limits, and which one applies depends on where the GIF goes. A GIF sent in a message counts against your account's upload limit. A GIF uploaded as a custom emoji or sticker is held to a far smaller limit that Discord publishes as a fixed number.
Messages: free, Nitro Basic, Nitro
A free account can send files up to 20 MB. Discord announced the change on 13 August 2026 with the words "Starting today, the free upload limit is increasing from 10MB to 20MB", as quoted by Dexerto. Nitro Basic stays at 50 MB and full Nitro at 500 MB. The free limit had been cut from 25 MB to 10 MB in September 2024, which is why so many different figures still circulate.
Discord also changed how it measures. According to the same report, mobile uploads are now measured before compression instead of after, matching desktop, so a file that only squeezed under the old limit after the app compressed it no longer gets that grace.
Custom emoji and stickers
Discord's own guide to custom emoji, dated December 2025, gives 256 KB as the emoji file size and 128 × 128 pixels as the ideal dimensions, adding that bigger or smaller images will work. It accepts JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP and AVIF files. The guide also says Discord will compress an emoji that is a bit over the size, and that using an animated emoji needs Nitro.
Emoji slots grow with server boosts: 50 standard and 50 animated emoji on an unboosted server, 100 of each at Level 1, 150 at Level 2 and 250 at Level 3, according to the same guide.
Stickers are stricter on shape. Discord's sticker guide (March 2025) asks for exactly 320 × 320 pixels and at most 512 KB, with PNG for still stickers and APNG or GIF for animated ones. Every server starts with five sticker slots, rising to 15, 30 or 60 with boosts.
Why Discord says it cannot resize a GIF
The "Cannot resize GIF" message appears when you upload an animated GIF as an emoji and Discord cannot shrink it to fit. Discord's help pages do not document the message itself. Troubleshooting guides such as MakeUseOf's (July 2023) tie it to GIF emoji over 256 KB or larger than 128 × 128 pixels, and note that it occasionally appears even for files inside both limits.
The dependable fix is to do the resize yourself before uploading. Crop the GIF to a square, scale it to 128 × 128, then reduce the palette until the file is under 256 KB. The steps are at the end of this page.
GIF length on Discord
Discord publishes no duration limit for GIFs. Every limit above is in bytes, or in pixels for stickers, so a long GIF fails only because each extra second adds frames and each frame adds bytes.
X (Twitter), Slack, Tumblr and GIPHY
X (Twitter)
X's Help Center article on posting pictures and GIFs says an animated GIF can be up to 5 MB from mobile and up to 15 MB on the web. Only one GIF fits in a post, and it cannot share a post with other images. X also notes that a GIF which plays once instead of looping displays as a static image.
Slack
Slack's help article on custom emoji says images can be JPG, PNG or GIF, that "square images under 128KB and with transparent backgrounds work best", and that GIFs can include up to 50 frames. Slack words 128 KB as a recommendation rather than a hard cap and does not say what happens to larger files, so treat it as the target.
The article states no pixel size. In practice a Slack emoji GIF has to be a small square with a reduced palette to fit 50 frames into 128 KB.
Tumblr
Tumblr's image and GIF troubleshooting page says GIFs under 3 MB are not compressed, though every uploaded GIF is converted to Tumblr's GIFV format. A compressed GIF should be no larger than 5 MB, and Tumblr will try to compress an uncompressed GIF under 10 MB. If it cannot serve a GIF over 5 MB, only the first frame shows.
The same page recommends GIFs no more than 540 pixels wide, which also helps keep a GIF under the 3 MB line.
GIPHY
GIPHY's help centre article on GIF creation caps uploads at 100 MB and 15 seconds, and recommends 8 MB or less and 6 seconds or less. Its developer documentation goes further for apps that display GIPHY content: use MP4 wherever supported, WebP as a fallback, and not the GIF format.
Email and websites: no hard limit, practical ceilings
Email has no GIF size limit in any standard. The 1 MB figure in the table is a working rule, not a published cap: a newsletter GIF has to download before it plays, often on mobile data. Keep animations near or under it and put the message in the first frame.
The first frame matters because not every client animates. The caniemail GIF test, last run in February 2020, found that Outlook for Windows, versions 2007 to 2019, does not support animated GIFs, and that Outlook 2019 with Office 365 plays an animation three times and then stops.
On a website the only limit is your page-weight budget. A multi-megabyte GIF costs every visitor that many bytes before it loops, and for anything longer than a few seconds a muted, looping MP4 or WebM is far smaller. The GIF vs WebP vs APNG vs MP4 comparison measures the difference on the same clip.
If a GIF came out much bigger than you expected, why is my GIF so large breaks the size down factor by factor, with measured numbers for each one.
Getting a GIF under a limit
Work backwards from the target: pick the row in the table, then change the fewest things that get the file under it. All three tools below run in your browser tab, so the GIF is never uploaded.
- For a message limit, cut the palette first, because 256 to 128 colours is rarely visible. The GIF compressor shows the new size against the platform limits as you adjust it.
- For an exact byte budget such as 256 KB, the GIF file size reducer takes the target and searches for settings that fit.
- For an emoji or sticker, crop to a square first with the animated GIF cropper, then scale to 128 × 128 for a Discord emoji or 320 × 320 for a sticker.
- If it is still too big, drop frames or shorten the loop; fewer frames is fewer bytes.
For video placements rather than GIFs, the social video spec sheet lists sizes and durations per platform. The 1:1 square format sheet covers square pixel sizes, including the square frames that emoji and stickers use.