Convert GIF to PNG — Free GIF to PNG Converter

How to Convert GIF to PNG

Why Convert GIF to PNG?

GIF is limited to 256 colors, which can make photos and detailed graphics look banded and low-quality. Converting to PNG gives you full 24-bit color (16.7 million colors) plus lossless compression and transparency. The result is a sharper, more accurate image.

PNG is the better choice for static images like logos, icons, screenshots, and graphics that were originally saved as GIF. The file may be slightly larger, but the quality improvement is significant for anything beyond simple animations.

Note that this conversion captures the first frame of animated GIFs. If you need the animation preserved, GIF should remain in its original format.

Your browser does the converting: LeanImg only supplies the code, so the GIF never leaves the machine and there is no copy of it anywhere to worry about. The tool is free and needs no account.

JPG output is smaller if transparency doesn't matter to you; the compressor can then shrink the PNG further without touching a pixel.

Compress your PNG · GIF to JPG

What changes going from GIF to PNG

LeanImg scans the GIF's block structure before decoding and counts image descriptors; if it finds more than one, the result card tells you that only the first frame was converted and that the size comparison is one frame against the whole animation. The decode itself goes through the browser's GIF decoder, which yields the first frame and nothing after it.

Transparency is carried as an alpha channel with exactly two values, 0 and 255, because that is all a GIF can express; the PNG gains the capacity for soft edges but no actual softness. Interlacing is not preserved, the comment extension, the loop count and every frame delay are gone, and the PNG is written without text, gamma or profile chunks. Not one palette entry is altered.

On size, a still GIF typically lands close to where it started and often a little under, since the output goes through oxipng, which can keep a 256-colour image as an indexed PNG, and deflate generally beats LZW. An animated GIF loses every frame but one, so its drop is large and meaningless. Don't use this when the motion is the point: there is no animated output on this path, and WebP is no rescue either, because the converter writes a single frame to every target.

GIF vs PNG

What is a PNG file?

PNG became a W3C Recommendation in October 1996, designed after Unisys began enforcing the LZW patent that GIF relied on. It is lossless and only lossless: one compression method, deflate, applied after per-scanline filters. Every tool advertising a lossy PNG is really quantizing to a 256 color palette before writing an ordinary lossless PNG. Transparency comes in three grades: a real alpha channel at 8 or 16 bits, up to 256 alpha levels from a palette table, or a single keyed color.

How to open a PNG file

Nothing needs installing anywhere: Preview and Quick Look on macOS, Photos and Paint on Windows, and libpng as a base dependency on Linux mean GIMP, Krita and every GTK or Qt application read it. The interesting tools are the optimizers — optipng, oxipng and zopflipng rewrite the file losslessly, and LeanImg's compressor runs oxipng at optimization level 3 without ever changing a pixel.

Convert other formats to PNG

Convert GIF to other formats

• GIF to JPG

Frequently Asked Questions