Convert WebP to GIF in your browser
An animated WebP comes back as an animated GIF, every frame of it. Expect a bigger file with coarser colour, because a GIF has only 256 of them. Nothing leaves this tab.
or browse your device. Everything is processed on this device
Then this is the wrong trade. The same animation stays a third of the size and keeps every colour if you leave it as a WebP and simply make it smaller.
Compress the WebP insteadHow to convert WebP to GIF
Animated or still, one or a hundred. They are read straight off your disk into this tab and never uploaded.
That is everything a GIF can hold. If the file needs to be smaller, this is the control to pull down, and the panel tells you what it cost.
Look at gradients and skin tones first: those are where 256 colours shows. Turn dithering off if the picture is flat artwork and the noise is doing more harm than the banding.
Still animated, still looping, and larger than the WebP you started with. That is the format, not the conversion.
What you lose going from WebP to GIF
Colour, first and most visibly. A WebP stores sixteen million colours; a GIF stores a table of at most 256 and one index per pixel. A screenshot, a logo or a flat illustration often has fewer than 256 colours to begin with and survives the trip untouched. A photograph, a video clip or anything with a gradient in it does not: the sky turns into stripes, skin turns blotchy, and no setting on this page prevents it, because it is the format doing what the format does. Dithering trades that banding for fine noise, which usually looks better and always costs bytes.
Transparency, second. WebP has a full alpha channel, so a shape can fade out over 256 steps. GIF has one transparent entry in its palette, which means every pixel is either fully there or fully gone. A soft shadow or an anti-aliased curve therefore comes back with a hard, slightly ragged edge, and it will be ragged against whatever colour is behind it rather than the one you designed against.
Size, last, and by a wide margin. GIF compresses with LZW, published in 1984, and codes every frame as a full picture. WebP has real inter-frame prediction and a modern entropy coder. The same animation is routinely three to five times larger as a GIF, and there is no honest way around that: if the destination would accept a WebP, an MP4 or even an APNG, all three are better files. This page exists for the destinations that will not.
WebP to GIF FAQ
Will the animation survive the conversion?
Yes, and it is the reason this page exists. An animated WebP is a container of little rectangles, each with its own timing and its own rules about blending and clearing. This tool takes them out one at a time, composites each onto a full canvas so the picture is complete, and writes the lot back as GIF frames with the loop count carried over. Most converters draw the file onto a canvas instead, which sees frame one and nothing else.
Why is the GIF so much bigger than the WebP?
Because GIF is more than twenty years older. It codes each frame with LZW and has no real motion prediction, while WebP has both a modern entropy coder and proper inter-frame prediction. Three to five times larger is normal, and on a long clip it can be worse. Pulling the colours down to 128 or 64, or capping the width, are the two levers that actually move the number.
Why does my photograph look banded and blotchy?
Because a GIF holds 256 colours and your photograph had far more. The palette is chosen from the image, so it is the best 256 available, but a sky that ran through two thousand shades of blue now runs through a dozen and you can see every step. Dithering hides it by mixing neighbouring colours into a fine noise, which reads better at normal viewing size. If the picture must look right, GIF is the wrong destination for it.
What happens to a transparent background?
It stays transparent, but it stops being subtle. GIF marks one palette entry as transparent and every pixel is either that entry or opaque, so the 254 intermediate levels of alpha a WebP can hold are rounded to fully on or fully off. Soft shadows and anti-aliased edges come back with a hard fringe. If the animation will sit on a known background colour, matching that colour before converting is the usual fix.
Does the animation play at the same speed?
Within a hundredth of a second, yes. WebP times frames in milliseconds and GIF times them in hundredths of a second, so every frame has to be re-timed. We round against the running clock rather than each frame on its own, which stops a ninety frame loop finishing a second early. Frames asking to run faster than 20ms are the exception: no browser plays a GIF that quickly, so those are held slightly longer and the panel says when it happened.
Can I convert a still WebP too?
Yes. A still comes back as a one frame GIF, and the tool says that is what happened rather than leaving you to wonder. It is rarely a good idea though: for a still picture, PNG keeps every colour and the full transparency, and JPG will be far smaller than either. GIF is worth it for a still only when something at the other end insists on the extension.
Is there a limit on the size or length of the animation?
Your own memory is the limit. Every frame is held as full uncompressed pixels while the work happens, so a very large animation is refused rather than allowed to crash the tab, and in that case you get its first frame and a sentence explaining why. A few hundred frames at normal sizes is comfortable on an ordinary laptop.
Are my WebP files uploaded to convert them?
No. The WebP 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.