PNG to GIF
Nothing you choose here leaves your browser. There is no server to send it to — the conversion happens on your own device, using the codecs your browser already has, and nothing is uploaded, stored or seen by anyone.
What this conversion costs you
Two hundred and fifty-six colours, chosen rather than truncated. A GIF holds 256 colours and a PNG can hold sixteen million, so this conversion has to CHOOSE which 256. The page picks them by median cut over the colours actually in your picture and dithers the result, which is why a photograph comes out looking reduced rather than broken. Transparency survives, but only as fully on or fully off — GIF has one transparent colour, not an alpha channel.
The metadata. Going through a canvas drops EXIF, so the camera, the date and any GPS coordinates do not survive. That is a side effect rather than a feature, and a useful one.
How it works, and why nothing is uploaded
Your browser can already read PNG. No browser writes a GIF, so this page writes one itself — and unlike the other formats here that means making a JUDGEMENT rather than just writing bytes in the right order. A GIF holds 256 colours, so the page chooses which 256 by median cut over the colours actually in your picture, then dithers to hide the joins. Nothing is downloaded to do it and nothing is sent anywhere.
It also means the page can tell you when your browser cannot do it, which it will say plainly rather than producing a broken file. The one thing it will never do is hand you a file with the wrong contents: browsers quietly return a PNG when asked for a format they cannot write, so every conversion here checks what came back and refuses if it is not what was asked for.
Where to go next
The same conversion, the other way round, and the other targets:
- GIF to PNG — the same conversion the other way
- PNG to JPG — the format every camera and every website has understood for thirty years
- PNG to WebP — Google's format, usually a good deal smaller than JPG or PNG at the same quality
- HEIC converter — iPhone photographs, which need a different approach
What this does not do
It converts one picture at a time from each file, and does not edit, crop or retouch. It cannot convert a format your browser cannot read — JPEG XL, QOI and HEIC all need something extra, and HEIC has a page of its own.
It does not upload anything, so it cannot work on a file that is not on the device you are using. And it does not preserve metadata: if you need the EXIF kept, this is the wrong tool, and if you wanted it gone, this is a convenient way to do it.