PNG to GIF

GIF is best known for animation, but plenty of systems still want a plain, still GIF: older forums and message boards, some email signature editors, legacy content management systems, retro web projects and certain embedded or kiosk systems. This converter turns PNG images into single-frame GIFs while handling the format’s limits as well as possible.

The 256-color limit

A GIF image can contain at most 256 different colors. For each PNG, the converter analyzes the colors it actually uses and builds the best possible palette of up to 256 of them. Every pixel is then mapped to its nearest palette color. Graphics that already use few colors, like icons, logos, charts and pixel art, come through unchanged. Photographs and smooth gradients get visible steps, known as banding, because thousands of shades have to share 256 slots.

Transparency becomes on or off

PNG supports soft transparency, where each pixel can be partly see-through. GIF only knows two states. Pixels that are less than half opaque become fully transparent, the others become fully solid. For crisp pixel art, nothing changes. For anti-aliased logos and text, the smooth edge turns into a slightly stair-stepped outline. If you know the background color where the GIF will be shown, placing the logo on that color first in an image editor gives clean edges.

Why there is no dithering

Some converters scatter dots of neighboring colors to fake missing shades, a technique called dithering. It hides banding in photos but adds noise to flat graphics and makes files larger. Since still GIFs today are mostly used for logos, icons and pixel art, this converter maps each pixel to its nearest palette color, keeping flat areas clean. For deliberate dither effects, the Image Dithering Tool offers several patterns.

Images that work well

Pixel art and sprites, simple flat logos, black-and-white line drawings, diagrams with a handful of colors, and screenshots of plain interfaces all suit GIF. A small GIF of such an image can even be smaller than the PNG, although PNG usually compresses a little better.

Images that do not

Photographs, illustrations with soft shading, glow effects and images with semi-transparent shadows suffer the most. For those, keep the PNG, or use JPG or WebP when transparency is not needed. GIF was designed in the late 1980s for exactly the kind of simple graphics that still suit it today.

Batch conversion and resizing

Drop many PNG files at once; each becomes its own GIF, listed with its size. “Limit size” scales large images down by their longest side before conversion, which also helps the palette, because fewer pixels tend to contain fewer subtle colors.

Need an animation instead?

This converter makes still GIFs, one per PNG. To combine several PNG frames into an animated GIF with timing and looping, use the GIF Maker. For full-color animations with smooth transparency, the Animated WebP Maker is the modern alternative.

Email signatures and old systems

Some email programs and signature generators accept GIF more reliably than PNG, especially for small logos. Keep the logo small, around 100 to 200 pixels wide, with a solid background matching your email’s background, and the GIF will look clean everywhere.

Privacy

Conversion happens entirely in your browser. Unreleased logos and internal graphics are never uploaded.

Related tools

To go back from GIF to a lossless format, use GIF to PNG. For photos, PNG to JPG or PNG to WebP give far better quality per byte.