Convert GIF to PNG

What a GIF already lost, and what PNG cannot give back

A GIF holds at most 256 colours, chosen as a palette and referenced by index. Converting to PNG lifts that ceiling — PNG can hold sixteen million — but there is nothing to put in the space, because the colours were discarded when the GIF was made. A photograph saved as a GIF and converted to PNG is still a 256-colour photograph in a format capable of more. The conversion cannot restore what the palette threw away, and any tool that claims otherwise is inventing pixels.

The same applies to transparency, and this is the one that actually bites. GIF transparency is a single bit: a pixel is either fully see-through or fully opaque, with nothing in between. So a round logo on a GIF has a hard, jagged, stair-stepped edge, usually with a halo of whatever colour it was matted against. PNG supports 256 levels of transparency and the converted file will use exactly one of them, because one is all the GIF had. Softening that edge means redrawing it, not converting it.

Dithering explains the file size, which often goes up. To fake colours outside its palette, a GIF scatters pixels of adjacent colours in a fine checkerboard — and that pattern is, as far as a compressor is concerned, noise. PNG compresses by predicting each pixel from its neighbours, which works beautifully on flat areas and fails on dither, so a dithered GIF can produce a PNG several times its size for identical pixels. A flat-colour graphic converts to a smaller PNG, as expected.

Animation does not survive: an animated GIF converts as its first frame, because PNG is a still format. That is the genuine reason GIF is still around in 2026 despite being thirty-eight years old and worse at everything else.

When you want something else

If the GIF moves, this is the wrong conversion entirely. For a short animation on a web page, ffmpeg -i in.gif -c:v libvpx-vp9 out.webm or an animated WebP is dramatically smaller and smoother than the GIF, and every current browser plays both. gifsicle --optimize=3 is the right answer when it has to stay a GIF.

For a still frame, it is worth asking what the picture is. If it is a photograph, PNG is preserving a 256-colour approximation at full file size and a JPG would be smaller with no additional loss worth mentioning. If it is a graphic, pngquant or oxipng -o 4 will shrink the PNG substantially, and ImageMagick's magick in.gif -coalesce out-%d.png writes out every frame rather than only the first.