# How to edit a GIF frame by frame

There is no GIF editor here, and there does not need to be: a splitter that takes the animation apart into frames, and a maker that builds one from frames, are an editor with a folder in the middle — and the folder is the part where you do the editing, with whatever you already use for images.

Last updated 26 August 2026

## The short answer

1. **Take it apart.** Open the [GIF Splitter](https://abox.tools/split-gif/) and drop the GIF in. Every frame becomes its own PNG — as it appears on screen, with the transparency kept — and the ZIP includes a timing list, the per-frame delays written down for the rebuild.
2. **Edit the folder.** Delete the frames that should go, retouch the ones that should change in any image editor, rename to reorder. A folder of PNGs is a format everything understands.
3. **Put it back together.** Drop the folder on the [GIF Maker](https://abox.tools/gif-maker/), set the hold times — or lean on the timing list — choose the palette, and export.

All three steps run in your browser. Nothing is uploaded at any point, which matters more than usual here: the GIFs people fix are so often screen recordings with something sensitive half-visible in them.

## What the splitter can tell you before you edit

The splitter shows, for every frame, its delay, position, size and disposal — and that panel is worth a look before touching anything, because it explains the two surprises in most GIFs.

First: frames are not all whole pictures. Many GIFs store only the pixels that changed, patched over the frame before — the splitter offers each frame *as it appears* or *as stored*, and for editing you almost always want *as it appears*, so each PNG stands alone. Second: delays are per frame, not one number. The pause on the punchline is a real delay on a real frame, and the timing list is what carries it across the round trip.

For the common cuts, the folder step is optional: keeping every second or fifth frame, or ticking the frames to keep, is built into the splitter itself — halving the frames is the single most effective slimming a GIF can get.

![The splitter showing twelve numbered frames of an animation, each with the delay it is held for.](https://abox.tools/screens/edit-a-gif-frame-by-frame/apart.webp)

Every frame, numbered, with its own delay. This is the half that tells you what you are editing before you edit it.

## What the rebuild costs, honestly

A GIF holds at most 256 colours, chosen when it is built. The rebuild quantises the frames again — one shared palette, or the best colours per frame — and on photographic material that second quantisation can show. On screen recordings and drawings, the usual cargo, it does not: they never used 256 colours to begin with.

The maker's other levers are the ones the [GIF budget guide](https://abox.tools/guides/make-a-gif-from-part-of-a-video/) describes: fewer colours, Floyd–Steinberg dithering for gradients, and loop behaviour — forever, once, or a count.

To see whether the surgery worked — and where the bytes actually live — drop the result on the [GIF Analyzer](https://abox.tools/gif-analyzer/): it charts frames against bytes, and the heavy frame is usually a full repaint someone could crop.

The maker offers that trip itself: after the export, a row under its download button carries the fresh GIF straight into the analyzer, already loaded.

![The GIF maker with six frames listed in order, each with a delay field, and a row for setting every delay at once.](https://abox.tools/screens/edit-a-gif-frame-by-frame/together.webp)

And back the other way. The delays have to be put back by hand, which is the part of the round trip worth knowing about in advance.

## If you do this every week

Split, folder, rebuild — the steps live on separate pages because each does one job, and each can prove on its own that nothing leaves your machine. But all of it is open source: MIT-licensed, one folder per tool, dependency-free ES modules whose READMEs explain the decoder, the disposal rules and the quantiser.

If GIF surgery is a recurring chore, point a coding agent at the [repository](https://github.com/A-Box-of-Tools/website) and ask it to fold the splitter's frame table and the maker's encoder into one page where deleting a frame is one click. The modules were written to be read, and lifting them is what the licence is for.