GIF to PNG Converter
- The Exif data, the colour profile and anything else the original carried are not passed on: the picture is decoded to plain pixels and a new file is written from them.
- An animated GIF comes through as its first frame. The frames after it are not converted.
- Reads the first frame of an animated GIF only, and tells you how many frames it left out.
Needs JavaScript. Runs only here.
This page turns a GIF into a PNG on your own machine. Every conversion on this page runs in your browser. The picture is read, drawn and written on your own machine, and the file is not sent to a server.
Going the other way? Convert PNG back to GIF →
How do you convert a GIF to a PNG?
A GIF draws every pixel from a palette of at most 256 colours. A PNG can hold each of those colours and each clear pixel exactly, so the first frame comes through unchanged.
A GIF converted to PNG keeps every pixel of its first frame exactly, and clear pixels stay clear. An animated GIF gives one still picture: the page counts the frames and tells you how many were left out.
- Choose the GIF file you want to convert. It is read inside this page, on your own machine.
- Select Convert to PNG. The page reads the first bytes of what came back and refuses the file if they are not PNG.
- Download the PNG. If the GIF was animated, the page has told you how many frames it left out, because the PNG holds the first one only.
GIF to PNG keeps the first frame exactly and leaves the rest of an animation behind, and the image converter lists every other pair with what each keeps and drops.
What Changes From GIF to PNG
GIF to PNG keeps every pixel of the first frame exactly, clear pixels included, because PNG can hold any colour a GIF palette holds and has a full alpha channel. The frames after the first are not converted.
Each row below is one property of the picture: what it is in the GIF, what it becomes in the PNG, and whether it survives the trip. Convert a file and the same rows fill in with the measurements from your own picture.
| Property | In the GIF | In the PNG | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dimensions | as the file has them | as the file has them | kept |
| Colour model and bit depth | palette indices, at most 256 colours | RGB with alpha, 8 bits per channel — 8 bits per sample, whatever the source held | changed |
| Alpha channel | one palette entry may be marked clear | carried through: clear pixels stay clear | kept |
| Colours used | at most 256 | the same colours | kept |
| Animation frames | 1, or several — GIF can carry an animation | 1 — the first frame | changed |
| Metadata (Exif, ICC) | present in the file | dropped — a new file is written from pixels | lost |
| Compression | variable-length-code LZW over palette indices | lossless, deflate | changed |
| File size | the file you chose | depends on the picture — both sizes print once you convert | changed |
the pixels survive; the Exif data does not.
Going Back to GIF
Converting back does not restore what this step dropped, so convert the PNG result back to GIF only when you need a GIF file.
The change above runs one way — go back from PNG to GIF writes a new file, not the original.
What Travels With the Picture
What the two formats are, and what the browser does with a picture on the way between them. None of this depends on which GIF you bring.
How GIF and PNG Are Defined
| Property | GIF | PNG |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | variable-length-code LZW over palette indices; the coding step is exactly invertible, so nothing is lost after the picture has been reduced to the palette | lossless - deflate with a sliding window of at most 32768 bytes (compression method 0) |
| Alpha channel | none - one palette entry may be marked transparent and is skipped when drawn | yes - a full alpha channel on colour types 4 and 6; a tRNS chunk gives a transparent colour key on types 0 and 2 and per-entry alpha on type 3 |
| Animation | yes - several images in one data stream, each preceded by a Graphic Control Extension whose Delay Time is in hundredths of a second. Looping is not part of the specification. | yes - APNG is normative in the Third Edition, using the acTL, fcTL and fdAT chunks |
| In one sentence | A GIF draws every pixel from a colour table of at most 256 entries. Transparency is one of those entries marked clear, so a pixel is either wholly transparent or wholly opaque. | PNG stores a picture without losing anything: the specification defines lossless as reconstructing the original data exactly, bit for bit. It carries an alpha channel, and since the Third Edition it can carry frame-based animation as well. |
- A GIF file begins 47 49 46 38 39 61 ("GIF89a") or 47 49 46 38 37 61 ("GIF87a").
- A PNG file begins 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A.
- GIF is defined by Graphics Interchange Format Version 89a (CompuServe, 1990).
- PNG is defined by PNG Specification (Third Edition), W3C Recommendation 24 June 2025; the Second Edition is ISO/IEC 15948:2004. The Third Edition is not itself an International Standard..
PNG, GIF, WebP and ICO can carry transparency; JPEG cannot, because the standard defines no alpha channel, and a bitmap written here is opaque. Converting to a format without transparency fills the clear areas with a background colour.
GIF transparency is a single palette entry marked clear. A pixel is either wholly transparent or wholly opaque, so a soft edge that fades out cannot survive the conversion.
PNG allows bit depths of 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16, and five colour types: greyscale, truecolour, indexed-colour, and each of greyscale and truecolour with alpha. Not every depth is legal for every type.
Drawing an animated GIF or WebP takes a single picture from it - the image the format names as its default, or the first frame where there is none - so the converted file holds one picture and not the animation.
Converting a picture back to the format it came from does not return the original file. Whatever a step discarded stays discarded, and the return trip writes a third file.
The browser decodes the picture to plain pixels and writes a new file from them, so the Exif data, the colour profile and anything else the original carried are not passed on.
Drawing an animated image onto a canvas uses the image the format names as its default, or the first frame where the format names none. The other frames are not reachable this way.
A file written from a canvas uses the bit depth that best preserves the canvas, so an ordinary eight-bit canvas writes eight bits per sample however deep the original was.
From an animated GIF this site converts the first frame only. The browser hands a page one picture, and a GIF names no default image, so that picture is the first frame; the page counts the frames and says how many were left out.
Which Frame Does the PNG Hold?
The first one, and only that
A browser hands a page one picture from an animated file, and a GIF names no default picture, so the one it hands over is the first frame. This page counts the frames in the GIF and tells you how many the PNG leaves out.
Why not an animated PNG
PNG itself can animate; the Third Edition made that part of the format. The limit is the browser, which gives a page no way to reach the frames after the first, so a moving PNG would need a GIF decoder this page does not carry.
If you need every frame
Open the GIF in an editor that shows its frames as layers and export the ones you want. A GIF frame can be smaller than the picture and drawn over the frame before it, so a frame on its own is not always the picture you saw.
Common Mistakes
- Expecting the animation to survive. The PNG holds the first frame, and the page tells you how many frames it left out.
- Expecting a smaller file. The browser writes eight bits a sample for every pixel rather than a palette, so the PNG can come out larger than the GIF.
- Expecting smoother colour. The palette is already part of the GIF's pixels, and the PNG copies them rather than restoring the shades it replaced.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens to an animated GIF when it becomes a PNG?
You get its first frame as one still PNG. The browser hands the page that frame only, so the page counts the rest and tells you how many were left out.
Does converting a GIF to PNG keep transparency?
Yes. A GIF pixel is either fully clear or fully opaque, and a PNG alpha channel holds both exactly, so a clear background stays clear. There are no soft edges to lose, because a GIF never had any.
Does converting a GIF to PNG lose quality?
No. Every pixel of the first frame keeps the colour it had. Whatever the palette did to the picture when the GIF was made is already in those pixels, and it stays.
Can the PNG be larger than the GIF it came from?
Yes. The browser writes eight bits a sample for every pixel and cannot write a palette PNG, so a small GIF of flat colour can grow. Convert yours and the table prints both sizes.
You can, but the round trip is not the file you started from: the PNG to GIF direction.
Related Conversions
The rest of the family sits on the image format converters.