When you send and receive attachments, whether it’s an image, gif, or other media, in Messages, you end up taking up a lot of memory on your iPhone.

How much space do GIFs take?

GIF files tend to be quite small ~20Kb. GIF compression is inferior to JPEG compression but has the advantage of being animated and transparent. GIF files are an image format where a pallet of 256 colors (red/green/blue) is encoded as a byte stream (256 values).

Why do GIFs take up so much memory?

It’s just older technology and not as good as compressing data. GIFs are just a list of images. Each frame takes up just as much space as a photo. … Since most frame look extremely similar to the one before, each frame is a lot smaller.