From GIF to a modern lossless format
GIF dates from 1987 and is limited to a palette of at most 256 colors per image, with transparency that is either fully on or fully off for each pixel. PNG was created in the 1990s partly as a patent-free replacement for GIF and improves on it in every way for still images: millions of colors, smooth alpha transparency and generally better compression. This GIF to PNG converter moves your image to PNG without changing a single pixel.
What stays the same
- Colors. Every pixel of the GIF's palette is reproduced exactly; PNG is lossless.
- Transparency. Transparent GIF pixels stay transparent in the PNG, so icons and stickers keep their background-free look.
- Dimensions. Width and height are unchanged.
Animated GIFs
An animated GIF contains many frames. This converter produces a single still PNG from the first frame, which is exactly what you want for a thumbnail, a poster image or a preview. It does not create animated PNG (APNG) files, and later frames are not exported. If the first frame is blank or a fade-in, the result may look empty; in that case, extract the frame you need with a dedicated animation tool.
Need a different frame, or all of them?
Some animations begin with a blank or fade-in frame, so the first frame can look empty. In that case a command-line tool gives you full control:
# ImageMagick: only the first frame
magick animation.gif[0] still.png
# every frame as its own PNG
magick animation.gif -coalesce frame-%03d.pngThe -coalesce option matters: GIF frames often store only the pixels that changed since the previous frame, and without it you get partial images with transparent holes. Coalescing rebuilds every frame to full size before saving, so each PNG looks exactly like the animation at that moment.
Why convert GIF to PNG?
- Editing. Once in PNG, you can add colors beyond the 256-color palette, soft shadows and semi-transparent edges without dithering.
- Static web graphics. Old sites often use GIF for logos, buttons and icons. PNG files of simple graphics are frequently smaller than the GIF and look the same.
- Thumbnails of animations for video galleries, messaging previews or documentation.
- Compatibility with tools that do not import GIF, such as some icon generators and design workflows.
File size
For simple graphics, PNG's compression is usually more efficient than GIF's LZW, so the file may shrink. Photos or dithered images saved as GIF can grow slightly as PNG. The size comparison shows exactly what happened for your image.
Need a JPEG instead, for example for a photo-like frame? Use the GIF to JPG converter. To embed the resulting PNG directly in HTML or CSS, try PNG to Base64, and to change its size, the image resizer.
Everything happens in your browser with the canvas API: the image is never uploaded, and the converted file is created on your device.