How to Convert GIF to PNG or JPG

What happens to an animated file

An animated GIF is a stack of frames with timing information. The converter draws the picture through the browser's canvas, which holds one image, so it takes the first frame and ignores the rest. A notice appears for that file so you know the animation was not preserved. This also holds for animated PNG (APNG), animated WebP and animated AVIF; they are treated the same way.

If the first frame is not the one you want, there is no frame picker in this tool. Some animations begin on a blank or fading frame, so the result may be empty or faint. In that case, extract the frame you want with a program that can export frames, save it as a still image, then convert that. If you need the animation itself, a PNG or JPG cannot hold it. Neither can the converter's other outputs, since it writes no GIF and no animated format.

Convert in four steps

1. Add the GIF files to the converter.
2. Choose PNG for flat artwork, logos, memes with text or anything with transparent parts; choose JPEG for GIFs that came from photographs.
3. If you choose JPEG and the GIF has transparent pixels, pick a background color for them, since JPG cannot be transparent. The transparency article shows how to choose.
4. Check the sizes and the notice, then download.

Why GIF pictures behave differently from other formats

A GIF picture is limited to a 256-color palette. A photograph squeezed into 256 colors is usually dithered, meaning the encoder scatters dots of different colors to imitate shades. Those dots become permanent noise in the pixels. When you convert such a GIF to JPG, the JPG encoder spends many bytes trying to preserve the dither pattern. Converting to PNG keeps it perfectly, which is large.

GIF transparency has no middle ground: each pixel is see-through or solid, and nothing in between. A PNG made from a GIF with a cut-out shape will still show jagged edges, because that information was never there. Putting a GIF cutout on a dark background often reveals a light fringe from the original white backing, an effect the conversion cannot remove.

A 3 MB GIF is not 3 MB of picture

People often worry that converting a big GIF will give a big image. The arithmetic says otherwise. Suppose a GIF runs 10 seconds at 15 frames per second: 150 frames. If the file is 3,000,000 bytes, that averages 20,000 bytes per frame. The still image you get contains one frame, not 150, so its size depends only on the pixel dimensions and detail of that frame. For a 480 x 270 first frame (129,600 pixels), a raw 3 bytes per pixel is 388,800 bytes, and the PNG or JPG will usually be a fraction of that.

Conversely, a tiny GIF can hide many frames. Check whether a file is animated by opening it in a browser and watching it, since the file size alone does not tell you. The converter flags the animation with a notice, so you will see it either way.

Measured sizes for flat and photographic GIFs

I made two synthetic test pictures with the Pillow library and measured them. The first was a 800 x 600 flat banner, a red rectangle and a line of black text on white, reduced to 16 colors. As GIF it was 3,804 bytes. As a truecolor PNG it was 5,403 bytes, and as JPG at quality 90 it was 16,874 bytes, about 4.4 times the GIF. The second was a 1920 x 1080 smooth picture with soft shapes, reduced to 256 colors: 124,907 bytes as GIF, 70,184 as PNG, 99,668 as JPG at 90, and 66,123 as JPG at 80.

Two lessons. For flat artwork, PNG is the better home and JPG is the worst choice, both in size and in the speckles it adds around the text. For the photo-like GIF, PNG was smaller than the GIF itself, since GIF's compression method is older, but the JPG at 80 was smaller still. Other encoders, including those in browsers, produce different byte counts and real pictures will land elsewhere; trust the sizes listed next to your own files.

Choosing the output for a GIF you have

• Reaction images, memes, stickers with text: PNG. Edges stay clean. If you plan to upload to a site that recompresses images anyway, the extra size rarely matters.
• Logo or icon from an old website: PNG, and consider whether a larger version exists. A GIF cannot be sharpened by converting; for vector sources, see SVG to PNG.
• Photo that was stored as GIF: JPG at 85 to 90 if size matters, though the dithering will be visible at 100 percent zoom and cannot be removed. PNG if you intend to edit it.
• A GIF you want to keep as an animation: do not convert. Everything in the converter produces still images.

Rules of thumb for deciding in seconds

• If the GIF has fewer than about 16 distinct colors and hard edges, it is artwork. PNG.
• If it looks grainy or speckled when you zoom in, it is a dithered photograph. JPG for sending, PNG only for editing.
• If it has a transparent border and you need that border, PNG; any JPG will fill it with a color.
• If you only want a thumbnail or preview of the animation, the first frame is exactly that, and a JPG at 80 to 85 is plenty.

None of these depends on the file's age. Whether a GIF is ten years old or from last week, its palette limit and lack of soft transparency are the same.

When the still is not the picture you expected

The converted still can look wrong next to the GIF playing on a page. The converter saves exactly the first frame, and animations are often built so that the first frame is not the best one: a fade-in that starts almost blank, a text reveal that begins with an empty background, or a loop whose first frame is a plain title card. If your GIF looks fine in motion but the converted file looks empty or faint, that is the likely reason, not a fault in the conversion.

Compare the result against the first moment of the animation, and if it does not match, take the frame you need from a program that exports individual frames, then convert that still image. For a broader view of the formats involved, see image file formats explained.