Convert GIF to PNG

Why GIF is a poor working format

GIF was designed for slow modems in the 1980s. It supports at most 256 colours, transparency that is either on or off per pixel, and a compression scheme that is nowhere near as effective as modern formats. It survives almost entirely because of animation support and universal compatibility. As a source for further work, it is limiting: many editors flatten GIF layers, colour correction tools struggle with indexed colour, and print and design software often refuses the format outright.

What you get from a PNG

PNG is lossless, uses a full RGB colour space with an 8-bit alpha channel, and is accepted by every editor, office application, browser and operating system. Converting a GIF to PNG does not add colours that are not there, but it moves the image into a format where you can then edit it freely, add smooth transparency, and save without accumulating any loss.

Animated GIFs

This is the most common surprise. A PNG can only hold one image, so an animated GIF is reduced to its first frame. If the first frame is a blank or a title card, the result is not useful. To keep the animation in a modern format, the options are converting to a video (MP4 or WebM) or to an animated WebP, both of which need a different tool. If you only wanted a still from the animation, the first frame is what you get; to grab a specific later frame, pause the GIF in a browser and take a screenshot instead.

Common reasons to convert

• Placing an old GIF logo or icon into a design layout, a presentation or a Word document.
• Uploading an image to a platform that rejects GIF for still images.
• Editing an image in software that handles indexed colour badly.
• Producing a clean transparent asset from a GIF with a transparent background.
• Archiving graphics from an old website in a format that will remain readable.

File size

Because a GIF already has few colours, the PNG is usually a similar size or a little smaller; PNG's compression is more efficient than GIF's LZW on the same data. For a batch of old web graphics the PNG versions are typically 10 to 30% smaller. Drop them all in together and download the results as a single ZIP.