Guide
Making animated WebP stickers and clips play as GIF
Animated WebP has quietly become common: stickers in messaging apps, animations saved from websites and exports from design tools often use it. Some places still only play GIF, including several email programs, older chat clients, forums and presentation software. This tool converts WebP animations, and still WebP images, into GIF while keeping the timing.
Reading the WebP animation
An animated WebP is a sequence of frames, each with its position, duration and two flags: whether it blends with what is already on screen, and whether its area is cleared afterwards. The converter reads that structure, has the browser decode each frame and replays the animation on a full canvas, so every resulting frame is exactly what a browser shows.
From millions of colors to 256
GIF frames can use at most 256 colors. For each frame, the encoder picks the 256 colors that represent it best, so a frame of a sunset gets oranges and a frame of the sea gets blues. Simple stickers and cartoons look practically unchanged. Photographic animations and smooth gradients show some banding, the classic GIF look. Keeping the width modest helps, because fewer pixels means fewer subtle shades to represent.
Transparency the GIF way
WebP supports soft, partial transparency; GIF only knows fully transparent or fully opaque pixels. Pixels more than half transparent are dropped, the rest kept. Without help, the soft edges of a sticker would turn into a dark, jagged outline. The option “Smooth soft edges onto a color” blends those edge pixels with the color of the background you expect, so the outline looks smooth there. It is on by default with white.
No ghost frames
In a transparent animation, a moving shape must not leave traces of earlier frames behind. The encoder clears each frame before the next one is drawn whenever the animation has transparency, so frames never pile up in GIF viewers.
Timing and looping
Each frame keeps its own duration, rounded to the 10-millisecond steps GIF can store, with a minimum of 20 milliseconds because most viewers will not show frames faster than that. Choose loop forever or play once. The speed control lets you make a slow sticker snappier or slow down a fast one.
Still WebP images
A still WebP becomes a single-frame GIF with the same palette and transparency rules. For still images, though, WebP to PNG or WebP to JPG usually gives better quality and smaller files.
Making the file smaller
Large GIFs come from many frames, many pixels and many colors. Reduce the width with the size limit, speed up the animation if frames can be dropped visually, and prefer cartoon-like content. For website use, keeping the animation as WebP or converting it to video with GIF to MP4 is more efficient.
Checking the result
The finished GIF plays next to the original so you can compare them. Look at the edges of stickers against the page background, and at gradients in photographic frames. If the edges look wrong, change the smoothing color to match where the GIF will be used and convert again. It only takes a few seconds, because everything runs on your device.
Related tools
To go the other way, GIF to WebP shrinks GIF animations. GIF Frame Extractor saves individual frames of WebP animations as images.
Checked against the current version of the WebP to GIF on .