Convert JPG to GIF

Be clear about what GIF will do to a photo

GIF reduces every image to a palette of 256 colours. A JPG photograph has smooth skin tones, gradients in the sky and thousands of subtle shades, and they will be mapped onto that small palette with dithering to hide the transitions. The result looks grainy up close and slightly posterised from a distance. There is no quality setting that avoids this; it is intrinsic to the format. So the honest advice is: only convert a photo to GIF if something downstream insists on it.

Where that insistence comes from

• Old forum software and bulletin boards with a fixed list of allowed avatar formats.
• Email signature editors in some corporate mail systems.
• Legacy CMS and intranet tools written before PNG support was universal.
• Some digital signage and kiosk systems.
• Older embedded web interfaces on routers, printers and cameras.

In each of those cases the platform typically displays the image small, which hides most of the palette reduction. For a 100 pixel avatar, GIF is perfectly acceptable.

Getting the best result

• Resize first. Set a max width so the GIF is no larger than it will be displayed. Fewer pixels means the dithering is less visible and the file stays small.
• Prefer simple subjects. A product on a plain background converts well; a sunset over the sea does not.
• Increase contrast slightly in an editor beforehand if the image is soft. Palette reduction tends to flatten low-contrast areas.
• Check at actual size rather than zoomed in. Dithering is designed to blend at normal viewing distance.

File size compared

For anything other than small, simple graphics, GIF is the larger file and the worse picture. Use it only when required.