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Convert GIF to PNG

Files never leave your device. All processing happens in your browser.

Pixels. Leave empty to keep the original dimensions.

How to convert GIF to PNG

  1. 1

    Drop in your GIF files.

  2. 2

    Each one is decoded and re-saved as a PNG, transparency included.

  3. 3

    Download the results — animated GIFs give you their first frame.

The important thing to know before converting a GIF is that it will almost certainly be an animation, and PNG cannot hold one. If your GIF moves, what you get here is a single still image: the first frame. That is not a limitation of this tool but of the PNG format, and no converter can work around it.

The 256-colour ceiling is already baked in

GIF stores at most 256 distinct colours per frame, chosen from a palette. Any image with more than that — which is essentially every photograph — had to be reduced when it was first saved as a GIF, usually by dithering: scattering pixels of two available colours to approximate a third. That is why photographic GIFs have a speckled, grainy quality when you look closely.

PNG has no such limit and can store millions of colours. But it cannot invent the ones GIF threw away. Your PNG will faithfully reproduce the 256-colour dithered image, dithering pattern included. The conversion is a clean, lossless copy of a lossy source — good for stopping further degradation, useless for undoing what already happened.

Transparency improves in one specific way

GIF transparency is binary: each pixel is either fully visible or fully invisible, with nothing in between. That is why GIF cut-outs have hard, stair-stepped edges and often a faint fringe of the old background colour around them. PNG supports 256 levels of transparency, so while the conversion cannot smooth an edge that is already jagged, it does mean you can now feather or soften that edge in an editor — something GIF would never let you save.

What happens to file size

  • A still GIF usually becomes a similar-sized or slightly smaller PNG, since PNG compresses palette-style images well.
  • An animated GIF becomes dramatically smaller, because you are keeping one frame out of dozens or hundreds.
  • Heavily dithered photographic GIFs can grow, because the dithering pattern is noise and noise is what PNG compresses worst.

When to use this conversion

Grabbing a still from an animation, getting a logo or icon into a format your software accepts, or preparing a GIF for editing without further generation loss. If instead you want the animation preserved, PNG is the wrong target entirely — an animated format is what you need.

Decoding and re-encoding both happen in this tab on your own device, so no copy of the file is created anywhere else.

Questions about GIF to PNG

Will my animated GIF still be animated as a PNG?

No. Standard PNG cannot store animation, so you get the first frame as a still image. This is a property of the format rather than of this tool — no converter can produce an animated standard PNG.

Does converting to PNG give my image more colours?

It removes the 256-colour limit for the future, but it cannot restore colours the GIF already discarded. The PNG reproduces the palette-reduced image exactly, dithering and all.

What is the speckled grain in my converted image?

Dithering. When the original was saved as a GIF, colours beyond its 256-colour palette were approximated by scattering pixels of two available colours. PNG copies that pattern faithfully because it is now part of the actual image data.

Is the transparent background kept?

Yes. GIF transparency is on-or-off per pixel and carries across intact. PNG additionally supports partial transparency, so you can now soften those hard edges in an editor if you want to.

Why is my PNG larger than the GIF?

Usually because the GIF was heavily dithered. Dithering is essentially fine-grained noise, and noise is the hardest thing for PNG to compress. Flat graphics and logos normally get smaller.

Can I choose which frame of the animation to keep?

Not here — the first frame is what you get. Extracting an arbitrary frame requires decoding the full animation, which is a different job from format conversion.

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