GIF to WebP Converter

What happens when you convert GIF to WebP

• The image is decoded and written as a lossy WebP at 90 percent quality, keeping transparency.
• Animated files are converted as a still of the first frame.
• GIF is lossless and WebP is not, so the file shrinks a lot, at the cost of some fine detail around sharp edges.

How to convert GIF to WebP online

1. Press "Choose GIF files" and select one or more files, or drag them onto the box. You can add files of any size your device can hold in memory.
2. Adjust the settings if you need to. Lower quality gives a smaller file.
3. Press "Convert to WebP". Images convert in a second or two each.
4. Save each WebP with its download button. Close the tab and every trace of the files is gone from memory.

Why convert GIF to WebP?

GIF files usually come from short looping animations, reactions and simple graphics. People convert them to WebP because WebP makes images much smaller for websites while keeping transparency.

In short, GIF is good at what it was made for, and WebP is the more practical choice when the file has to open, upload or print somewhere else. GIF opens and animates in every browser, while WebP opens in all current browsers; older Photoshop and Windows Photo versions cannot open it.

How to convert GIF to WebP on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android

On Windows

Open this page in Chrome, Edge or Firefox, drag your GIF files in from File Explorer, and press Convert. Each WebP is saved to your Downloads folder.

On a Mac

Safari, Chrome and Firefox all work. Drag the GIF files from Finder onto the drop zone and the WebP files land in Downloads.

On iPhone and iPad

Open the page in Safari and tap Choose GIF files. You can pick from Photos or from the Files app. The converted WebP appears in Files, in the Downloads folder; to put it in your photo library, open it there, tap Share and choose Save Image.

On Android

Open the page in Chrome, tap Choose GIF files and pick them from Files or your gallery. The WebP is saved to the Download folder, where any file manager can find it.

Best settings for GIF to WebP

WebP is lossy, so the Quality setting trades file size against detail. Best is 95, High is 90, Medium is 80 and Small file is 65 on the usual 0 to 100 scale. At High the difference from the GIF is invisible for photos; at Small file you may see softness around text and fine patterns.

The Maximum width setting shrinks large images before encoding. A 4000 pixel phone photo reduced to 1920 pixels loses three quarters of its pixels and most of its size, yet still fills a laptop screen.

GIF vs WebP: the differences

About GIF and WebP files

What is a GIF file?

GIF stores each frame with a palette of at most 256 colours, so photos turn grainy and animations get large fast. Transparency is on or off per pixel, with no soft edges.

What is a WebP file?

WebP can be lossy or lossless and still keep transparency, and at the same visual quality it usually lands 25 to 35 percent smaller than JPG. It is the reason so many images saved from websites turn out not to be JPGs.

GIF to WebP not working? Common problems

• Colours look slightly different. Browsers convert images to the standard sRGB colour space when they decode them, so wide-gamut and CMYK images can shift a little.
• A phone photo comes out upright even though it looked sideways elsewhere. That is correct: the rotation stored in the photo is applied during conversion, so the WebP is always the right way up.
• The file is bigger than expected. The WebP is usually far smaller, because lossy compression discards detail the GIF kept.

Convert GIF to WebP from the command line

If you work in a terminal, ImageMagick converts GIF to WebP in one line:

magick input.gif -quality 90 output.webp

To convert every GIF in a folder at once, use magick mogrify -format webp *.gif. The converter on this page does the same job without installing anything.