GIF and animation: what a still converter cannot do

GIF is an old format with a limited palette, and its one enduring feature is that it can store an animation as a sequence of frames. That feature is also the source of most confusion when converting.

A still format cannot hold an animation

PNG and JPG store one image. When an animated GIF is converted to either, only one frame can survive. The choice is which frame, and the sensible answer is the first, because that is what the viewer sees before the animation starts and what a thumbnail shows.

Silently discarding the remaining frames would be a bad outcome, so this tool reads the frame count from the GIF header and reports it in the result: "This GIF has 24 frames. Only the first frame was converted." You can then decide whether that is what you wanted.

When conversion to a still format is the right call

• You want a still for a document, slide or article and the animation is incidental.
• The animation is a short loop you can replace with a video, which will be far smaller.
• You need a format the destination accepts, and it does not accept GIF.

When it is not

If you need the animation preserved, converting to a still format is the wrong operation. Nothing on this site produces an animated output: the formats offered are still formats, and claiming otherwise would be dishonest. For animation you want a video format, or a purpose-built GIF tool.

GIF quality is already fixed

GIF has a palette of at most 256 colours and one fully transparent colour index. There is no quality setting to adjust, because the quality was decided when the GIF was made. Converting a GIF to PNG keeps exactly those colours with no further loss, and the PNG will usually be larger because it stores the same palette less cleverly for this kind of content.