Convert a PNG into a still GIF without uploading it. The palette is reduced to 256 colors, which suits flat graphics far better than photos.
Nobody picks GIF for image quality any more, but plenty of software still lists it as the only format it will accept: forum and wiki uploaders, older learning-management systems, email-signature builders, in-house tools nobody has touched in fifteen years. When a form rejects your PNG and offers .gif instead, a straight conversion is faster than hunting for a workaround.
First, color. A PNG can hold millions of colors; a GIF holds at most 256. The converter analyzes your image, builds the best 256-color palette it can, and maps every pixel onto it. Flat artwork — logos, icons, diagrams, screenshots of plain interfaces — often comes out indistinguishable from the original, because it never used many colors to begin with. Photographs and smooth gradients band visibly, and no setting prevents that; it is the format’s hard ceiling. Second, frames. The output is one still image. This page does not build animations, so dropping several PNGs gives you several separate GIFs rather than a moving one.
GIF output from this converter does not carry transparency through, so a PNG that relies on a see-through background comes out with those areas filled in solid — keep the PNG if the cut-out matters. File size can move either way: flat graphics usually shrink once they are down to 256 colors, while detailed photographs often grow, because indexed pixels compress poorly. Everything runs in a Web Worker in this tab, so nothing is uploaded, there is no sign-up, and you can convert as many images as you want and take them all as one ZIP.
Not here — each file becomes its own single-frame GIF. For animation, the MP4 to GIF tool on this site builds one from a short video clip.
GIF allows only 256 colors per image, so smooth gradients and skin tones have to be approximated. For photographs, JPG or the original PNG will always look better.
No. The GIF produced here is opaque, so transparent regions of the PNG become solid pixels. Stay with PNG or WebP when you need transparency.
No. The palette is built and the GIF encoded inside your browser; there is no upload and no server involved at any point.