Convert GIF to WebP

Drop an animated GIF below and get an animated WebP back: every frame, the same timing, the same loop. WebP is already selected; files go up to 16 MB as a guest or 32 MB with a free account. Free. No account, no watermark.

  • Animation kept
  • Frame timing and loop kept
  • Transparency kept
Compression Level
None
No compression, only apply settings on image
Lossless
Without any visual change in the image quality
Ultra
Max compression with some quality loss
Smart
Balance between the image quality and compression
Change Format Will allow you to convert images to different extensions
Auto WEBP AVIF PNG JPG Auto tries every format your image can be saved as and gives you the smallest one
Resize Will allow you to change the width, height or scale of images
Keep EXIF Will allow you to preserve meta data in images
Maximum file size is 16 MB per image and supported formats are: PNG, JPG, JPEG, WEBP, GIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF
Guests get 20 images a day, 20 left today. A free account gets 50 a day.
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Choose the compression level that suits your images
Level What it promises What happens Pick it when
Lossless
Not one pixel changes in a JPEG, PNG or GIF The file is repacked, never re-encoded. JPEGs get an optimised Huffman table and progressive scan, PNGs a tighter deflate pass, GIFs a lossless gifsicle run. A lossy WebP has no repack step, so it is re-encoded at the highest quality the level allows. A sideways phone JPEG is rotated losslessly on the way through and keeps its colour profile. The one exception to the promise is a PNG or WebP tagged with a wide-gamut profile such as Display P3: its colours are converted to sRGB, so the values change but the picture doesn't. Logos, line art, anything you'll edit again, or when the file is evidence.
Smart
No visible change, targets 40 dB PSNR and a perceptual score of 70 A quality search runs per image and stops at the lowest quality that still clears the PSNR target. That answer is then scored on the SSIMULACRA 2 scale, because an average over every pixel lets a mostly flat picture through at a quality its detail doesn't deserve, and when it falls under 70 the search moves back up until it doesn't. Photos and graphics end up at different qualities because they need different ones; an image that cannot reach the targets inside the quality ceiling is encoded at the ceiling. Almost everything on a website. This is the default for a reason.
Ultra
Smallest file, targets 34 dB PSNR and a perceptual score of 50 The same two-stage search with lower targets. Fine texture softens a little; edges and text stay sharp. Thumbnails, backgrounds, email images, anything shown small or blurred anyway.
None
No compression at all Only the resize, conversion or metadata setting you chose is applied. An untouched upload comes back byte for byte. You only wanted to resize or convert, and quality is someone else's decision.

Measured, not estimated

What GIF to WebP saved on four real animations

Four animations from the corpus our encoder settings were tuned on. They behave differently, and the last row is there to show that.

Sample Original Lossless Smart Ultra
Newton's cradle, rendered animation 480 by 360, 36 frames 301 KB GIF 268 KB 10.9% smaller 185 KB 38.4% smaller 80 KB 73.4% smaller
Galloping horse, photographic frames 300 by 200, 15 frames 555 KB GIF 443 KB 20.1% smaller 154 KB 72.2% smaller 69 KB 87.6% smaller
Rotating Earth, photographic frames 400 by 400, 44 frames 1.0 MB GIF 773 KB 21% smaller 406 KB 58.5% smaller 194 KB 80.2% smaller
Bubble sort, flat-colour diagram 300 by 180, 267 frames 151 KB GIF 100 KB 33.6% smaller 100 KB 33.6% smaller 100 KB 33.6% smaller

Every frame was kept in every result. The bubble sort diagram is flat colour: lossy frames would cost more than lossless ones there, so the encoder picks lossless frame by frame and all three levels land within a few bytes of each other.

Why WebP

GIF is a 1987 format doing a video's job

A GIF holds 256 colours a frame and compresses each frame with a scheme from the eighties. That's why a five-second clip weighs megabytes. Animated WebP stores full colour, and codes each frame against the one before it the way video does.

Iminify converts with gif2webp, which reads the whole animation and keeps its frame delays and loop count. Two of its options are off by default and worth a lot, so both are on here. One spends more effort on packing frames. The other lets the encoder choose lossy or lossless for each frame, which is what rescues flat-colour animations: forcing lossy on one made it 84% bigger than the GIF in our tests.

At Lossless every pixel of every frame is kept. Smart and Ultra allow loss inside photographic frames, which is where the big reductions in the table come from.

What survives

What a GIF keeps on its way to WebP

  • Every frame

    The whole sequence is converted, not a first-frame still. Resize in the same pass and every frame is resized too.

  • Timing and looping

    Per-frame delays and the loop count carry over, so the WebP plays exactly like the GIF.

  • Transparency

    A transparent GIF stays transparent.

  • Nothing to keep in metadata

    GIFs don't carry EXIF, so the Keep EXIF switch has no effect on this conversion.

When not to

When to keep the GIF

  • It's going into an email or a chat app. Many of them animate GIFs and show WebP as a still, or not at all.
  • The platform re-encodes uploads anyway. Most social networks turn a GIF into video themselves.
  • It's longer than a few seconds. Past that, an MP4 is smaller than either format, and Iminify doesn't make video.

How to

GIF to WebP in three steps

  1. 1

    Drop your GIF

    WebP is already chosen under Change Format.

  2. 2

    Pick a level

    Lossless keeps each frame exact. Smart is the usual choice for clips made from photos or video.

  3. 3

    Preview and download

    The result plays in the preview, so you can check the motion first.

Questions

GIF to WebP questions

From the blog

Give your GIFs a lighter format

WebP is already selected. Drop an animation and watch the result play before you download it.

Convert GIF to WebP Open the full tool