GIF to APNG Converter

GIF was designed in 1987 for graphics with small, well-separated colour palettes, and every frame is quantised down to at most 256 colours from whatever the source had. On a flat-coloured animation — a simple icon, a line-art loop — that ceiling is rarely noticeable. On anything with a gradient, a soft shadow, or a photographic background, the quantisation shows up as visible bands of colour where there should be a smooth transition, and semi-transparent edges get forced to either fully opaque or fully invisible with no in-between.

APNG removes both limits: it stores full 24-bit colour per frame plus an 8-bit alpha channel, so a gradient that banded in GIF renders smoothly, and a soft-edged shadow keeps its gradual fade instead of a hard cutout.

Better colour fidelity is not free — an APNG frame typically holds more data than an equivalent GIF frame, since it is not compressing down to a 256-colour palette. For a short, simple animation the difference is modest, often under a few dozen kilobytes; for a longer, colour-rich loop the APNG can end up noticeably larger than the source GIF.

That is usually a reasonable trade for a UI animation, product demo or app icon where visual quality matters more than shaving the last few kilobytes, since APNG still compresses far better than storing the same frames as separate PNGs.

Every current browser — Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge — decodes APNG natively and has done for several years, so an animation converted for use on a website will display correctly for essentially all visitors. The gap is outside the browser: some chat apps, older image viewers and a handful of content management systems still expect the plain .gif extension and either reject an APNG or, worse, silently show only its first frame.

For a website or web app, APNG is the safer choice; for a destination you don’t control — a forum, an unfamiliar upload form — keep the original GIF as a fallback.

Each GIF frame is decoded and re-encoded into the APNG’s full-colour format locally in your browser, so an unreleased animation or a client’s product demo is never sent to a server during conversion. Convert a single GIF or a whole batch of them in one sitting, and download the results without creating an account or waiting on an upload.