JPG to GIF

When you need a GIF from a JPG

Most of the time a JPG is the right file for a photo. Now and then a place asks for GIF instead: an old forum or guestbook that only takes GIF avatars, a school or office system built years ago, a newsletter tool with GIF as its only image type, or an old program that opens nothing else. This tool makes a GIF from each JPG so you can use the picture there.

How to convert

1. Choose up to 30 JPG photos, each up to 50 MB. You can also drop them on the box or paste one.
2. Press Convert to GIF.
3. Download each GIF, or all of them together as a ZIP.

From millions of colors to 256

A photo can contain hundreds of thousands of different colors; a GIF can hold 256. The tool looks at all the colors in your photo and chooses the 256 that cover it best, giving more of them to the colors that appear most. It then dithers: where a color isn’t in the set, it mixes nearby colors in a fine pattern, which your eye blends back together. That keeps gradients such as skies smooth at normal size, at the cost of a slightly grainy look when you zoom in. The result note says the colors were reduced.

Size, in pixels and in bytes

The GIF has the same width and height as the JPG. Because GIF compresses photos far less well than JPG, the file is often several times bigger. If the place you’re uploading to has a size limit, shrink the photo first with the Image Resizer: a 600-pixel-wide picture makes a much smaller GIF than a 4,000-pixel one.

What else to know

• Still images only: each JPG becomes one single-frame GIF; there’s no animation.
• Upright: photos taken sideways on a phone come out the right way up, and camera details such as GPS location aren’t copied.
• Names: beach.jpg becomes beach.gif. A file that can’t be read gets its own message, and the rest still convert. For logos and graphics with a clear background, PNG to GIF is the better start.