Discord GIF size limits: emoji, stickers, and uploads

Discord accepts GIFs in three places: as custom emoji, as attachments in a message, and, with Nitro, as an animated avatar or banner. Each has its own limit, and the one that trips people up is the emoji limit, because a GIF that looks tiny on screen can still be several hundred kilobytes. This guide collects the limits from Discord's help center and shows, with measured file sizes, which settings get a GIF under them.

The short version: an animated emoji has to be under 256 KB. At 128 × 128 px, either halve the frame count or drop to 64 colors; on our test clip, doing both gave about 100 KB.

Discord's limits for GIFs

These are taken from Discord's own help pages, listed under Sources at the end of this guide:

The free upload limit changed in August 2026, from 10 MB to 20 MB. Discord's File Attachments FAQ also notes that mobile apps now check the file size before compressing, so a big file from an Android phone can hit the limit more often than before.

Stickers are worth a note: Discord's sticker guidelines name APNG and PNG, not GIF. EasyGIF makes GIFs only, so it isn't the right tool for an animated sticker.

Making an animated emoji fit 256 KB

A GIF stores every frame as a full picture, so even at emoji size a few seconds of video add up. We took our standard test clip, a 2.4-second pan across a portrait photo at 10 fps, cropped it to a square, and encoded it at four sizes with EasyGIF's encoder. Each column changes one thing; ✓ marks files under 256 KB:

At 128 × 128 the default GIF was 314 KB, over the limit. Halving the frames brought it to 157 KB (−50%), and 64 colors to 196 KB (−38%). With both, it was 98 KB, leaving room for a longer clip.

In EasyGIF:

1. Add your clip or images, then open the Canvas tab and choose the Emoji size preset (128 × 128). Crop to the part that matters first, because a small emoji has no room for background.
2. Keep the clip short. For a video, set 5–10 fps in the trimmer; for an existing GIF, delete frames on the timeline.
3. If it's still over 256 KB, open Style and choose 64 colors. For flat cartoon art, also turn dithering off.
4. Click Create GIF and check the file size shown in the preview before you download.

A photo clip is close to the worst case. Flat drawings and pixel art with few colors compress far better, and the dithering guide shows how much turning dithering off saves on that kind of image.

GIFs in messages

For a GIF you post in chat, the limit is 20 MB on a free account, which few GIFs reach. Size still matters for how quickly the GIF loads for everyone in the channel. The guide to making a GIF smaller shows that width and frame count matter most: on our test clip, going from 480 to 320 px cut 52%, and halving the frames cut 50%.

If the clip is long or has sound, consider posting the video instead: Discord plays MP4 attachments in chat, and an MP4 is far smaller than the same clip as a GIF.

Transparent emoji

Emoji often need a transparent background so they sit cleanly on both Discord's light and dark themes. GIF transparency is all or nothing per pixel, so soft edges turn jagged. Bold outlines help, and the transparent GIF guide explains why and what to do about it.