What is a GIF file?
GIF dates from 1987 and remains the most widely supported animated image format. Each frame uses a palette of at most 256 colours and is compressed losslessly with LZW. Simple graphics, icons and short animated clips are its natural territory; photographs suffer from visible banding because of the small palette.
Transparency is binary: a pixel is either fully opaque or fully transparent, which produces jagged edges over coloured backgrounds. Animation is a sequence of frames with per-frame delays and an optional loop count. Because every frame is stored as pixels, an animated GIF is often many times larger than the same clip as an MP4 or WebP.
When GIF is the right choice
Strengths
- Animation plays everywhere without a video player, including in e-mail
- Lossless within its palette; crisp for flat graphics and pixel art
- Simple transparency for icons and stickers
Limitations
- Maximum 256 colours per frame: photos and gradients band visibly
- Very large files for animation compared with MP4 or WebP
- No sound and no partial transparency
How to open a GIF file
Browsers, messaging apps and image viewers play GIF animations; image editors usually show only the first frame unless they support layers as frames. To see how many frames a GIF has and how long they last, load it in the GIF to MP4 tool, which lists the frames before converting.
How to convert a GIF file
GIF to MP4 cuts the size of an animation drastically for websites and social media, GIF to WebP keeps it as an image with full colour and smaller size, and GIF to PNG extracts a still frame with proper transparency. In the other direction, MP4 to GIF turns a short video clip into a GIF.