The menu item admits it: Legacy
Photoshop's GIF export lives under Save for Web (Legacy), and the parenthetical is doing honest work. The dialog predates YouTube. For a 12-frame banner animation it's still perfectly serviceable. Point it at a video timeline and the complaints begin: a warning that animated GIF export tops out at 500 frames, memory climbing while it holds every frame at once, a preview that repaints at its own pace, and size control that amounts to nudging the color table and waiting.
None of that means Photoshop failed. It means a photo editor is being asked to be a video encoder through a dialog from another era. Give it the job it's good at, rendering the timeline, and let a GIF encoder handle the rest.
Render Video, then finish in the browser
File > Export > Render Video writes your timeline to an H.264 MP4 through the export path Adobe still maintains. It's quick, it has no 500-frame ceiling, and it hands you a clean intermediate.
Drop that MP4 into What the GIF and the controls the Legacy dialog rationed all show up in one panel: frame-accurate trim, crop locked to real ratios, frame rate, palette size, dithering, and a live size estimate that recalculates on every change instead of asking you to sit through another preview render.
Already exported the GIF? Bring the GIF.
The tool takes GIF input, not just video. Drag the 14MB monster Photoshop produced straight into the tab and it unpacks into frames like any other clip, ready to re-encode locally.
Then turn on Extra Compression, a lossy LZW pass that typically shaves 30 to 50 percent off the file with damage you'll have to squint for. Trim the dead frames while you're in there, crop the dead space, downscale if the pixels allow. The compression page covers the full diet, and the GIF editing page covers everything else you can do to a finished GIF.
Numbers that replace the quality slider
Save for Web asks you to pick Selective or Adaptive and hope. These settings work better, and the readout tells you immediately when they've worked.
- Frame rate: 12 to 15 fps reads smoothly for most timeline footage, and halving the frames is the fastest single cut on the board.
- Colors: start at 128, then try 64. Screen captures and product shots rarely show the difference; gradients will, so dither those.
- Scale: downscaling wins more kilobytes than any other control. Few destinations display a GIF wider than 800px.
- The estimate: it updates live. Stop when the number fits the destination, not when the sliders bottom out.
Sometimes the answer isn't a GIF at all
If the destination plays video, flip the Output Format switch from GIF to MP4 and export a silent H.264 instead, encoded locally by the browser's own encoder. The switch appears in browsers that have one (Chrome, Edge, Safari; Firefox varies). Same clip, same trim, and routinely a fraction of the GIF's weight. Save the GIF for the places that only accept images.
Every frame stays on your machine
Both routes, MP4 in or GIF in, run entirely client-side. Nothing uploads, nothing waits in a server queue, and the page keeps working with the network off once it has loaded. No account, no watermark, no size cap imposed from a rack somewhere. It behaves the same on Mac, Windows, ChromeOS, and Linux, which is more than can be said for keeping Photoshop licensed on all four.