Convert GIF to PNG in your browser
The first frame of the GIF as a lossless PNG, transparency and all. An animation has many frames and a PNG holds one, so the result tells you how many were left behind.
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No GIF to hand?
A PNG cannot hold it, so if the movement is what you wanted to keep, the file to work on is the GIF itself: cutting its palette shrinks it hard and leaves every frame in place.
Compress the GIF insteadHow to convert GIF to PNG
Animated or still, one or a hundred. They are read straight off your disk into this tab and never uploaded.
At 256 colours nothing is thrown away: a GIF never held more than that, so the PNG is an exact record of the frame it came from.
The result names how many frames the GIF had. If that number is not 1, the movement is not in your PNG and there is no setting that would put it there.
A .png that opens anywhere, keeps its transparent background, and is very often larger than the animation it came out of.
Why you get one frame, and why the file grows
A GIF is a stack of pictures with a delay on each one. A PNG is a single picture, and although the format has an animated variant called APNG, almost nothing writes it and it is not what anybody means by a PNG. So a converter has to choose a frame, and the first one is the choice that matches what people expect: it is the frame your operating system shows as the thumbnail, the frame that appears when the GIF is pasted somewhere that will not play it, and the frame somebody has in mind when they ask for a still. The result panel names the frame count either way, so a twenty-four frame animation never quietly becomes a one frame file without saying so.
The size usually goes up, often several times over, and that is the format keeping its promise rather than the conversion failing. A GIF stores one byte per pixel pointing into a palette of 256 colours, usually one palette for the whole file. A PNG stores full colour with an alpha channel and compresses it losslessly with Deflate. One honest frame can genuinely outweigh a hundred cheap ones. If the result needs to be smaller, cutting the palette on this page is the lever, and the PNG compressor will take it further.
What you gain is compatibility and headroom. A PNG opens in every editor, every browser and every upload form, carries a real alpha channel so the transparent background is no longer a single on-or-off palette entry, and can be edited and resaved without decaying, which a lossy format cannot. Converting will not improve the picture, though. Whatever the GIF lost to its 256 colour palette is gone, and a PNG of it is a perfect lossless record of a coarse image.
GIF to PNG FAQ
Which frame of the animation do I get?
The first one. It is the frame used as the thumbnail everywhere else, and the one people picture when they ask for a still of a GIF. The result panel tells you how many frames the file had, so if the answer is not 1 you know immediately what is not in your PNG rather than finding out when you open it.
Can I get every frame as a separate PNG?
Not from this page. It writes one PNG per file you drop, and that PNG is the first frame. Splitting an animation into a numbered sequence is a different job with its own questions about naming and packaging, and offering it here would mean handing you a ZIP from a page that promises a PNG. If the movement is what matters, keep the GIF and compress it instead.
Why is the PNG bigger than the whole animated GIF?
Because PNG records every pixel exactly and GIF does not. A GIF spends one byte per pixel on an index into a 256 colour table, usually one table for the whole file; a PNG stores full colour plus alpha and compresses it losslessly. A single frame stored properly really can outweigh dozens stored cheaply. Nothing has gone wrong, and if size matters, drop the palette here or run the PNG through the PNG compressor.
Does the transparent background survive?
Yes, and it comes out cleaner than it went in. A GIF marks one palette entry as transparent, so every pixel is either fully visible or fully gone. The PNG carries that across in a full alpha channel, which means the transparency behaves properly in editors and browsers. It will not gain soft edges the GIF never had, but nothing is flattened onto white.
Will the picture look better as a PNG?
No, and no tool can make it. Whatever detail was lost when the image was reduced to 256 colours is gone from the file for good, so what you get is a lossless, perfectly faithful copy of a coarse image. PNG is worth converting to for compatibility, for editing and for the alpha channel, not for quality that is no longer there.
Can a PNG animate at all?
There is an animated variant, APNG, which browsers do read. Almost nothing writes it, most desktop software treats an APNG as its first frame, and this page does not produce one. If you need the animation to survive, GIF and WebP are the two formats worth using, and compressing the GIF you already have is usually the better answer than converting it.
Is a still GIF converted losslessly?
At the default 256 colours, yes. A GIF never holds more than 256 colours, so a PNG written from it at that setting records every pixel exactly as the GIF stored it. Lower the colours slider and it becomes lossy, because colours are then being merged to make the file smaller.
Are my GIF files uploaded to convert them?
No. The GIF is decoded and the PNG is written by your own browser, in this tab. There is no upload endpoint in the site for a file to go to, which you can check in your network tools: convert something and watch that no request carries it. Disconnect from the network after the page loads and it still works.
Does this remove EXIF, GPS and AI metadata?
Yes, every time, and there is no way to turn it off. The image is decoded to pixels and encoded again from those pixels alone, so EXIF and GPS, the XMP packet, embedded colour profiles, and any Content Credentials or AI-generation tags the file arrived with do not survive. There is no switch for this, because there is no way to keep them. What no compressor can remove is a watermark written into the pixels themselves, such as the invisible marks some image generators add: those survive re-encoding here and everywhere else.
Related
Same format joins the queue. Anything else re-routes to its own tool.