APNG
Also known as: Animated PNG, apng file, animated png
APNG (Animated PNG) is an extension of the PNG format that stores a short animation in a single file with full lossless color and alpha transparency. It looks sharper than GIF — especially for gradients and translucency — but the files are usually larger.
- Lossless animation with full color and alpha
- Sharper than GIF, but usually larger
- Played by all modern browsers; falls back to first frame
Why APNG beats GIF on quality
GIF is limited to 256 colors per frame and only hard on/off transparency, which is why animated GIFs often look banded or have jagged edges. APNG keeps PNG’s full 24-bit color and 8-bit alpha channel, so gradients are smooth and edges blend cleanly over any background.
The trade-off is size. Because APNG is lossless, a colorful or long animation can be considerably larger than the same clip as GIF or as an animated WebP. For anything more than a few seconds, a video format is far more space-efficient.
Compatibility and storage tips
All modern browsers and most current image viewers play APNG, and a non-animated viewer simply shows the first frame, so it degrades gracefully. Older tools may treat it as a still PNG.
To keep files small, reduce the frame count, crop to the moving area, and run the result through an optimizer that strips redundant pixels between frames.