goodroi - 11:50 am on May 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

These days, Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience.

[mattcutts.com...]

If your page is close to a half megabyte there are probably things you can slim down or just remove from the page. This will improve user experience for users on slower internet connection and mobile users.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

Technically Google does look at site speed but I doubt a 69kb image will significantly impact your rankings.

I would suggest trying to balance user experience with page size. Is the animated gif just pretty or does it demonstrate an important detail that users want to know? If your site is a wedding photographer's gallery then you probably need to load a large amount of images, but if your site is a local car repair shop you probably don't need many high resolution images.