Convert PNG to GIF

Turn PNG logos, icons and graphics into GIFs for the places that still only take GIF, on your own device.

Convert PNG images to GIF in your browser, with transparent areas kept. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your files are not uploaded: everything runs in your browser on your device. The size limit is your device’s memory, and phones hold less; give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, and then it works offline.

Drop PNG files hereor click to choose files. Batches welcome.

    Working…

    Done

    Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.

    GIF lingers in places that never updated: forum avatars and signatures, email signatures in older Outlook versions, some learning platforms and CMS themes, embroidery and sign-cutting software, and legacy desktop apps whose image picker lists only GIF, JPG and BMP. When the logo or icon you have is a PNG, those places reject it or show it without its transparency.

    The converter reduces the PNG to a 256-colour palette, the most a GIF can hold, picking the colours that matter most in your image. Logos, icons, line art, pixel art and flat illustrations usually have far fewer colours than that and come through looking identical. Photos and soft gradients are where the limit shows, as banding across smooth areas like skies or shadows.

    PNG transparency is kept, with one difference. A PNG can be partly transparent, so the edge of a round logo fades smoothly into whatever is behind it. GIF has only on or off: each pixel here becomes fully transparent if it was less than half opaque, and fully solid otherwise. On a white page the result looks the same; on a dark background, antialiased edges may show a thin light fringe from the colour they were blended against.

    The PNG is a still image, so the GIF is a single frame. To make an animated GIF, start from a video on the Video to GIF page, or from an animated WebP on the WebP to GIF page.

    How it works

    1. Drop your PNG files onto the page, or tap to pick them. Animated or still, batches are fine.
    2. Nothing to set: animations keep every frame, their timing and their loop, and still images become a single-frame GIF.
    3. Download each GIF, or all of them as one zip.

    In your browser, not on a server

    Stayput first reads the opening bytes of each file, where every image format writes its signature, so it knows what the file really is whatever it is called. Your browser decodes JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF and SVG itself; TIFF goes through UTIF.js, HEIC through the libheif WebAssembly decoder, and JPEG XL (or AVIF, in a browser without native support) through the Squoosh decoders, all served from this site and cached. The browser re-encodes JPG, PNG and WebP; PDF, ICO, GIF, BMP and TIFF files are written by small encoders in the page. Nothing here needs a server.

    Compared with upload-based tools: Online converters upload your image, convert it on their machine, keep it for hours and cap you at a few files a day. This does the same conversion on your device, for as many files as your device’s memory can hold, with no upload to wait for.

    Verify it yourself. Give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, then turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode and run the tool again. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.

    Questions

    Will my transparent background stay transparent?

    Yes. Fully transparent areas stay transparent. Semi-transparent pixels, such as soft shadows and the smoothed edges of text, are rounded to either fully see-through or fully solid, because GIF has no partial transparency.

    Why does my photo look blotchy as a GIF?

    GIF allows 256 colours per image, and a photo has tens of thousands. Smooth gradients break into visible bands. For photos, PNG or JPG is the better format; GIF suits logos, icons and simple graphics.

    Is the GIF smaller than the PNG?

    Often, for simple graphics with few colours, since both use lossless compression and the palette is small. For detailed images the GIF can be larger, because GIF’s LZW compression is older and weaker than PNG’s.

    Can I combine several PNGs into an animated GIF?

    Not on this page: each PNG becomes its own single-frame GIF. For animation, make the frames into a short video and use Video to GIF.

    Is anything uploaded?

    No. The PNG is decoded, reduced to a palette and written as a GIF in this browser tab. Your files are not uploaded.

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