PNG to GIF Converter

Not every PNG suffers the same amount going into GIF. A flat-colour icon or a simple sprite can survive the trip almost untouched; a screenshot with soft anti-aliased text or a PNG holding a photograph will not. The difference comes down to how many actual colours the source image contains.

Converting a PNG to GIF

1. Upload your PNG.
2. Check roughly how many distinct colours the image uses — simple, flat artwork is a much safer candidate than anything photographic.
3. Convert; the tool reduces the palette to 256 colours or fewer as part of the process.
4. Compare the result against the original at actual size, not zoomed in, paying attention to any soft edges.
5. Download the GIF, or reconsider PNG or WebP if the result looks visibly degraded.

Why PNG artwork sometimes survives this better than a photo would

A lot of PNG files — app icons, simple illustrations, pixel art, flat-design graphics — are already built from a small number of solid colours. If an image genuinely uses fewer than 256 distinct colours to begin with, converting it to GIF’s indexed palette can be effectively lossless, since every colour it already contains simply gets a slot in the new palette.

The trouble starts at the edges. Most PNG artwork uses anti-aliasing — a soft blend of semi-transparent pixels along every curve and diagonal line, to avoid a jagged, staircase look. GIF cannot represent partial transparency at all, only fully opaque or fully invisible, so those soft edge pixels get forced to one extreme or the other, which is where a converted PNG most often picks up a slightly rough or haloed outline even when the flat colours inside look fine.

PNG situations and how GIF handles each one

• Simple flat-colour icon or logo — usually converts cleanly, since the colour count is already low and edges are often hard rather than anti-aliased.
• Screenshot with anti-aliased text — the text edges pick up visible fringing, because GIF cannot express the partial transparency or subtle shading used to smooth the letterforms.
• Photograph saved as PNG — behaves exactly like a JPEG would going into GIF — heavy banding and dithering, since photos routinely exceed 256 colours by a wide margin.
• Sprite sheet or pixel art — often an ideal candidate, since these are typically designed within a small, deliberate colour palette from the start.
• PNG with soft drop shadows or gradients — the gradient bands visibly, the same way it would in any other 256-colour conversion.

PNG to GIF questions