What converting a GIF to APNG gets you
A GIF is limited to 256 colors per frame and to one fully transparent palette index. That is why gradients band, why soft shadows go blocky, and why a GIF with transparency shows a hard halo when it sits on a background it was not flattened for. APNG has neither limit. It stores full 24-bit color and a genuine 8-bit alpha channel, so a pixel can be half transparent instead of only on or off.
The conversion runs locally. The GIF is decoded frame by frame in your browser, passed through a scaler, and written back out as an animated PNG with the alpha channel intact. Nothing is uploaded, so a private capture stays private and a large GIF costs no upload time.
Support is the honest tradeoff. Every current desktop and mobile browser animates APNG without a plugin, which covers websites, docs sites, and web apps. Many email clients, forums, and older chat apps do not, and will show only the first frame as a still PNG. APNG is a format for the web, not a universal delivery format.
- Choose one GIF or drop it on the page
- Set the output width, and lower the frame rate if you want a smaller file
- Convert locally and download the APNG
What the conversion preserves and what it cannot restore
Be clear about the direction of the gain. Converting an existing GIF cannot bring back colors the GIF already discarded. Banding that was baked in when the GIF was created stays baked in, because the converter faithfully carries across the 256-color frames it was handed. What you gain is everything after this point: the APNG survives further editing, compositing, and re-saving without a palette ceiling degrading it again.
The conversion is a re-encode, not a byte copy. Each frame is passed through the scaler with Lanczos resampling, and the output width and height are rounded to the nearest even number. If you leave the width at the source width and the source dimensions are already even, the result is visually identical frame for frame. An odd-width GIF loses or pads a single pixel column, which nobody will notice but which is worth stating plainly rather than calling the conversion lossless.
Transparency behaves the same way. APNG can hold partial alpha, but a GIF never had any, so what carries over is the same hard on-or-off transparency the GIF had. The benefit is that any new soft-edge work you do afterwards has somewhere to live.
Controlling file size and frame rate
File size can go either way. PNG compression is far more modern than the LZW compression inside a GIF, which helps, but full-color frames simply carry more data than palette frames, which hurts. Flat illustrations, screen recordings, and line art often shrink. Photographic or gradient-heavy animation usually grows.
Two controls move the number. Output width is the strongest lever, because pixel count scales with the square of the dimension: halving the width roughly quarters the data per frame. The frame rate selector is the second lever, offering 30, 20, or 12 frames per second against keeping the original timing. Screen recordings and UI animation read as smooth at 12 to 20 fps, so dropping the rate on that kind of source is close to free.
The animation loops continuously in the output, matching what a GIF pasted into a page normally does. If you need a smaller file for a chat or an email rather than a web page, keeping the original GIF or exporting an MP4 or WebM instead will usually beat an APNG on both size and compatibility.
- Width is the biggest size lever, since data scales with pixel count
- Drop to 12 or 20 fps for screen and UI animation
- Flat art tends to shrink, photographic animation tends to grow