Convert Image to GIF

This makes a still GIF, not an animation

Clearing this up first, because "GIF" means a moving image to most people now.

A GIF is a file format that can hold many frames and play them in sequence — which is why the word became shorthand for a short looping animation. But a GIF can equally hold a single still frame, and that is what this tool produces: one image in, one still GIF out.

If you want an animation, use the right tool for the source you have. Video to GIF turns a video clip into an animated GIF, which is how most animated GIFs are actually made. GIF to Video goes the other way if you have an animation and need a video.

If you want a still GIF — and there are real reasons to — you are in the right place. Those reasons are almost always external: an older forum, wiki, email system or content platform that accepts GIF and not much else; a piece of legacy software or an embedded display expecting GIF; a system that validates on the file extension. Nobody chooses a still GIF for its own qualities, because PNG is better at the same job in every measurable way.

256 colours, and why your photo may look wrong

This is the whole story of the format, and it is the reason a converted photograph can come out looking banded or speckled.

A GIF can contain at most 256 different colours in the entire image. That is a hard limit built into the format, set in 1987 and never changed.

For comparison, a JPEG or PNG can hold about 16.7 million. So converting a photograph to GIF means throwing away almost all of its colours and approximating the rest with the 256 that remain.

What that looks like in practice:

Smooth gradients break into bands. A sunset sky that shaded gently from orange to blue becomes visible stripes, because there are not enough intermediate colours to make the transition smooth. Skies, skin, shadows and any soft lighting are where you see it first.

You may see speckling. Converters scatter dots of the available colours to fake the missing ones — a technique called dithering — which trades banding for a grainy texture. Either way, something has to give.

Subtle colour shifts. Similar tones get collapsed into one, so fine variation in a face or a fabric flattens out.

So: what converts well? Images that never had many colours to begin with. Logos, icons, line drawings, diagrams, charts, cartoons, screenshots of interfaces, flat graphics, black-and-white images and pixel art all convert to GIF perfectly, because they fit comfortably inside 256 colours. For these, GIF is genuinely lossless.

And what does not? Photographs. If you must convert one, expect it to look worse, and consider whether the receiving system will really not take a JPEG or PNG.

Transparency behaves differently from PNG

A practical difference that catches people converting logos.

A PNG can be partly transparent — a soft shadow can fade smoothly to nothing, and an anti-aliased edge can be half-opaque, which is what makes PNG edges look clean against any background.

A GIF cannot. Its transparency is all or nothing per pixel — either fully visible or fully invisible, with nothing in between. That is why GIF logos on the old web had jagged, halo-ringed edges.

Rather than produce that, this tool flattens transparency onto white. So a transparent logo comes back on a white rectangle, which is predictable and usually what you want — but it does mean the result will not sit invisibly on a coloured background.

If you need transparency that works properly, you need PNG. Convert Image Format will produce one, and unless something specifically demands GIF it is the better choice in every respect.

What you get

Add as many images as you like and they convert in one pass, each appearing in a list as it finishes. Several come back as a ZIP, keeping the original filenames with the extension changed.

One detail worth knowing, because it is unusual: the conversion uses a proper GIF encoder, and if that encoder cannot load for any reason the result is labelled as a PNG fallback rather than silently handed to you as a file named `.gif` that is not one. So a GIF from this tool is genuinely a GIF, and if it is not, you are told.

File sizes are unpredictable with GIF, in both directions. A logo or diagram often comes out smaller than the PNG, because 256 colours compress efficiently. A photograph usually comes out larger than the JPEG despite looking worse, because GIF's compression was never designed for photographic detail.

Everything happens on your own device: no upload, no watermark, no account and no limit.

Related tools

Video to GIF makes an animated GIF from a video, which is what most people want when they say GIF. GIF to Video converts an animation into a video file, which is smaller and better quality for the same content. Convert Image Format produces PNG, which is the right answer unless something specifically demanded GIF.