Convert PNG to GIF — Still or Animated

When a GIF beats a PNG

PNG is the better format for a still image, so convert to GIF only when something asks for one: older forums and chat apps, email newsletters that must animate, some ad networks and upload forms, and anywhere you want a picture to move. Logos, icons, pixel art, diagrams and screenshots of text convert almost perfectly, because they rarely use more than 256 colours. Photos and smooth gradients show banding — for those, a JPG or WebP is the better small file.

Making an animated GIF from PNG frames

1. Name the frames so they sort in order (frame-1.png … frame-24.png; numbers are sorted as numbers).
2. Choose Animate the PNGs into one GIF and drop them all at once.
3. Set the delay: 100 ms is 10 fps, 40–50 ms is smooth motion, 300–500 ms suits a slideshow.
4. Keep 256 colours for detailed frames; drop to 64 or 16 for flat cartoon frames and a much smaller file.

Every frame is fitted to the first frame's shape (letterboxed, never stretched), and each gets its own 256-colour palette, which keeps colours truer than one shared palette. Frames that are a different size are centred.

Transparency in GIFs

A PNG can have soft, partly see-through edges; a GIF pixel is either fully visible or fully transparent. Keep transparency for stickers that will sit on many backgrounds, and accept a slightly hard edge. If you know the background colour, fill it instead — the edge is blended onto that colour and looks smooth. The background remover can make a white background transparent first, and GIF to PNG goes back the other way.