Convert PNG to GIF in your browser
One PNG becomes a one frame GIF, written on this device and never uploaded. Drop in ten and you get ten separate GIFs rather than one animation.
or browse your device. Everything is processed on this device
No PNG to hand?
A GIF of a screenshot or a logo is usually bigger than the PNG it came from. Cutting the PNG palette instead is often half the size, keeps the soft transparency and stays lossless.
Compress the PNG insteadHow to convert PNG to GIF
One or a hundred. They are read straight off your disk into this tab and never uploaded, and each one comes back as its own GIF.
Leave it at 256 for anything with a photograph or a gradient in it. Flat artwork can usually go to 64 or lower with nothing visible, and the file drops with it.
If the PNG had a transparent background, that is where this conversion shows: GIF transparency is on or off, so anti-aliased curves come back with a hard fringe.
Should a PNG be a GIF at all?
Usually not, and it is worth being blunt about it. PNG is lossless, holds sixteen million colours and stores a full alpha channel. GIF holds 256 colours, one bit of transparency, and compresses with an algorithm from 1984. Nothing about that trade favours the picture. The honest reason to do it is that something at the other end takes GIFs and nothing else: an old forum, a legacy content system, an email template, a piece of internal software written when this format was current.
What actually happens to the file size surprises people in both directions. A photographic PNG normally gets smaller, sometimes dramatically, because reducing sixteen million colours to 256 is a huge lossy saving that GIF is quietly making on your behalf. Flat artwork, screenshots and logos usually get larger, because PNG already compresses that kind of image extremely well and LZW does not. If the goal was a smaller file rather than the extension, compressing the PNG is the better job and it keeps every colour.
The one thing this page cannot do is make your picture move. A GIF can hold many frames, but the frames have to come from somewhere, and a single PNG is one picture. Turning a folder of numbered PNGs into one animation is a different tool with its own questions about frame order and timing, and this site does not have it. What you get here is a one frame GIF: a still image wearing a .gif extension, which is exactly what the systems that demand the extension are usually after.
PNG to GIF FAQ
Can I turn several PNGs into one animated GIF?
Not here. Every file dropped on this page is converted on its own, so ten PNGs give you ten one frame GIFs rather than a ten frame animation. Assembling a sequence is a genuinely different job, with decisions about frame order, timing and looping that a converter has no way to guess, and this site does not have a tool for it.
What happens to my transparent background?
It stays transparent, but it loses its subtlety. A PNG stores 254 levels of partial transparency between clear and opaque; a GIF marks a single palette entry as transparent and treats every pixel as either that or fully opaque. So the background stays clear, and anti-aliased edges, soft shadows and faded corners come back hard and slightly ragged. If the image will sit on a known colour, the usual fix is to flatten it onto that colour first.
Why does my image look banded or speckled?
Because 256 colours is the whole of what a GIF can store. The palette is picked from your own image so it is the best 256 available, but a gradient that ran through thousands of shades now steps through a handful. Turning dithering on scatters the error as fine noise, which reads better on photographs; leave it off for flat artwork, where it only adds grain and bytes.
Will the GIF be smaller than the PNG?
It depends entirely on the picture. A photograph usually shrinks, because throwing away all but 256 colours is a large lossy saving. A screenshot, a logo or a flat illustration usually grows, because PNG compresses that sort of image very well and LZW does not. If the file size is what you are chasing, compress the PNG instead: it stays lossless and keeps the transparency.
Does the PNG lose quality permanently?
Your PNG is untouched. It is read, never written to, and the GIF is a new file. What the GIF itself lost cannot be recovered though: converting it back to a PNG afterwards gives you a lossless copy of a 256 colour image, not the original. Keep the PNG.
Why would anyone still need a GIF for a still picture?
Because a surprising amount of software was written when GIF was the safe choice and never revisited it. Older forum and wiki uploaders, some email systems, several banner ad specifications and a good deal of internal enterprise software still check the extension and refuse anything else. That is the case this page is for, and it is the only case where the trade makes sense.
Are my PNG files uploaded to convert them?
No. The PNG is decoded and the GIF 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.