Remove Hidden Data From GIF Images
03 A format almost nobody's camera produces
GIFs are almost never a direct camera output - they're screen recordings, meme edits, or conversions from video clips. That means the GPS/camera-metadata risk this site covers elsewhere barely applies here: GIF's format spec doesn't really have a slot for EXIF the way JPEG does, and in practice a GIF's own metadata is usually limited to comment extension blocks, which are far less commonly used for anything sensitive.
Go deeper: why animated formats need a frame-count guard, specifically
The real risk with GIF isn't metadata, it's structure: a GIF can declare an enormous number of animation frames in a small file, and naively decoding "just render every frame" can turn a tiny download into a multi-gigabyte memory allocation - a decompression bomb, the same category of attack covered on the comparison page, just specific to animated formats rather than a single oversized image. This tool caps the number of frames it will decode before doing any work, tested directly (a real 5-frame animated GIF round-trips completely; the frame cap itself is enforced before allocation, not after).
What actually happens to a GIF here
Every frame gets fully decoded to raw pixels and re-encoded from scratch, the same reconstruction every other format on this site goes through - so any data riding along after the GIF's trailer byte, or hidden in a comment extension block, gets discarded the same way a polyglot JPEG or PNG would be handled. Animation timing (frame delays) is preserved; nothing about how the GIF plays changes, only what's not visibly part of the animation gets removed.