About the GIF to PNG Converter
PNG and GIF are both lossless, but PNG is the format that grew up afterwards: it stores up to 16 million colours, an eight bit alpha channel and better compression on the same indexed data. Converting the other way round costs nothing in quality, because everything a GIF can express fits comfortably inside a PNG.
The transparent palette slot in the GIF becomes a genuine alpha channel in the PNG, so the picture can be laid over a dark theme without a halo of leftover matte colour. Small icons and diagrams that were saved as GIF a decade ago usually come out of this converter slightly smaller than they went in, since PNG filtering handles flat rows better than LZW.
Animated GIFs are read as a single still: the browser hands over the first frame, and that frame is what gets written. If you need the whole animation you will want a video format instead. To make a fresh GIF from a still, try PNG to GIF, and to inspect what is inside a file before converting, open EXIF Viewer.
How to use
- Drop a GIF onto the left pane or click to browse for one.
- Check the status line, which reports the output dimensions and file size.
- Press Download to keep the PNG.
Common questions
- What happens to an animated GIF?
- Only the first frame is converted. PNG has no animation, so the remaining frames are dropped.
- Will the transparency survive?
- Yes. The transparent index in the GIF becomes real alpha in the PNG, with no matte colour left behind.
- Is the PNG always smaller?
- Usually for flat graphics, occasionally slightly larger for noisy or dithered GIFs. The status line shows the exact result.
- Does the conversion add any loss?
- None. Both formats are lossless and the palette expands cleanly into full colour.