About the GIF to BMP Converter
Some tools simply refuse anything but a bitmap: older Visual Basic forms, embedded display panels, label printers, machine vision samples and a surprising number of internal utilities. This converter produces the classic layout those programs expect, a 14 byte file header followed by a 40 byte BITMAPINFOHEADER, then rows of blue, green and red bytes stored bottom to top and padded to a four byte boundary.
No compression is applied, which is deliberate: BI_RGB is the variant with the widest support, and RLE bitmaps break older readers. That does mean the output is large and predictable, roughly width times height times three bytes plus padding. A 640 by 480 GIF of 20 KB becomes about 900 KB as a bitmap, so treat the result as an interchange file rather than something to email.
Since the 24-bit layout has no alpha channel, transparent pixels are painted onto the colour set in Flatten onto. Choose the shade the target software uses as its canvas so cut-out edges do not show a fringe. To go back to a compact indexed file afterwards, BMP to GIF rebuilds the palette.
How to use
- Choose the GIF you need in bitmap form.
- Set Flatten onto to the background colour of the program that will open it.
- Download the .bmp file and load it in the target application.
Common questions
- Which BMP variant does this write?
- An uncompressed 24-bit BI_RGB bitmap with a BITMAPINFOHEADER, the layout every Windows reader understands.
- Why is the bitmap so much larger than the GIF?
- BMP stores three raw bytes per pixel with no compression, while GIF indexes colours and compresses them with LZW.
- Can I get a 32-bit BMP with alpha?
- Not here. Alpha bitmaps rely on header extensions that many older readers reject, so this tool writes the safest variant.
- Does the row order matter?
- The rows are written bottom to top, which is the standard orientation for a positive height field, so images do not appear upside down.