Convert GIF to PNG — Free, Fast & Private
Read this first: the output is a still image. This converter extracts a frame from your GIF and writes it as a PNG. If the GIF is animated, the animation does not survive — you get one frame. That is not a limitation to work around; it is what almost everyone converting GIF to PNG actually wants, whether it is a logo trapped in an old GIF or a single frame pulled out of an animation for a thumbnail.
The 256-colour ceiling, and why it cannot be undone
GIF stores an indexed palette of at most 256 colours. Every pixel is a reference into that table. PNG stores up to 16.7 million colours directly, so converting removes the ceiling entirely — but it cannot recover colours the GIF never held.
This matters most for photographs saved as GIF, which is a mistake you inherit rather than make. When a photograph was reduced to 256 colours, the encoder almost certainly applied dithering: scattering pixels of two available colours in a fine pattern to fake a third. It reads as a smooth gradient at a glance and as visible speckle up close. PNG will reproduce that speckle perfectly, because it is now genuinely part of the image. If you have the original photograph, convert that instead.
Where the conversion pays off cleanly is flat-colour artwork — logos, icons, diagrams, screenshots of text. Those rarely exceed 256 colours in the first place, so nothing was lost, and PNG gives you a lossless copy you can edit without further degradation.
Binary transparency becomes real alpha
This is the most useful thing about the conversion. GIF transparency is a single on/off flag: one palette entry is nominated as transparent, and every pixel is either fully opaque or fully invisible. There is no in-between, which is why GIF logos have that characteristic jagged, stair-stepped edge, and why a GIF designed for a white page shows an ugly white fringe on a dark one.
PNG carries a full 8-bit alpha channel — 256 levels of partial transparency per pixel. Converting does not magically smooth the edges that GIF already hard-clipped, but it does give you a format where you can antialias them properly, and where any semi-transparent work you do afterwards is preserved. If you need a genuinely clean cut-out, the background remover will produce better edges than a GIF ever held.
File size will usually go up
Expect the PNG to be larger, sometimes several times larger. GIF gets its small size largely by only storing 256 colours; PNG stores full colour losslessly. For flat graphics the difference is modest. For a dithered photograph it can be dramatic, because the dither speckle is high-frequency noise and lossless compression cannot do much with noise.
If size matters more than losslessness, GIF to WebP keeps alpha and produces much smaller files, and GIF to JPG is smaller still if you do not need transparency. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
The 256-colour ceiling is a colour-depth limit; when a conversion costs you colour depth explains which conversions are irreversible and which merely raise the ceiling.