Convert GIF to PNG

Because a PNG holds one image and a GIF can hold hundreds. Converting takes the first frame and discards the rest, which is the only thing it can do.

If you wanted a still, that's the right answer. If you wanted the animation to survive, PNG is the wrong destination.

Keeping the animation

WebP is the practical choice. It stores animation, every current browser reads it, and it's usually a fraction of the size of the same GIF. An animated GIF converted to WebP commonly drops by 60 to 80%.

MP4 or WebM is better still for anything longer than a couple of seconds. Video codecs are enormously more efficient than GIF, which is why every social platform quietly converts uploaded GIFs to video. A 5MB GIF is often a 300KB MP4.

APNG is animated PNG. It works in current browsers and keeps proper transparency, but support in editors and apps is patchy, so it's a niche choice.

Why the colours look wrong

GIF stores at most 256 colours per frame. A photograph converted to GIF has already been reduced to that palette, usually with dithering, which is the speckled pattern you see in gradients and skies.

Converting to PNG preserves that speckle exactly, because PNG is lossless. It looks no better than the GIF, and the file may be larger.

Nothing can recover the original colours. They were discarded when the GIF was made.

What PNG does gain you

Proper transparency. GIF transparency is one bit: a pixel is either fully visible or fully invisible, which is why GIFs with soft edges have that jagged fringe, often in white or grey. PNG supports 256 levels of transparency.

Converting won't smooth an existing jagged edge, since the information isn't there, but it does mean any editing you do afterwards can have soft edges.

No palette limit. Anything you paint into the converted image can use the full colour range, which the GIF couldn't have held.

Picking a different frame

The conversion takes the first frame because that's the sensible default, and the first frame of most GIFs is a reasonable representative.

It isn't always. Plenty of GIFs open on a blank or dark frame and the interesting moment is in the middle. If you need a specific frame, the reliable route is to open the GIF in something that shows the frames, or convert it to video and take a still from there.

Sizes to expect

A short GIF converted to a single PNG is nearly always much smaller, because you're keeping one frame out of many.

A single-frame GIF converted to PNG is usually similar or slightly smaller, and PNG compresses flat colour better than GIF's older scheme.

A photograph in GIF form converted to PNG can grow, because the dithering pattern is noise, and noise is exactly what lossless compression struggles with. For a photograph, JPG or WebP will be far smaller.

What GIF is still good for

Not much, honestly. It survives because it's universally supported and because messaging apps and forums accept it. For anything you control, WebP is smaller with better colour, and video is smaller still.

The one real advantage is that a GIF plays anywhere without a player and without autoplay rules getting in the way, which is why they persist in email and older forums.

Everything runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and there's no limit on how many you convert at once.