Turns out resizing animated gifs with imagemagick is clumsy. Gifsicle does it quick and without fuss. Below is my command, taught by askubuntu. gifsicle --resize-width 600 helm-org-clock.gif -o hoc-smaller.gif This resizes my screen-capture gif to a scaled width of 600 and whatever height keeps the proportions, which dropped my size from 160k to 58k.