Convert PDF to GIF, one frame for every page

To convert PDF to GIF, select or drop your PDF on this page, keep Animated GIF of all pages, choose a Time per page and press Convert to GIF. Every page becomes one frame of a single GIF, in page order, and the GIF plays on a loop by itself. A one-page PDF gives a still GIF.

The work happens in two places. Our server draws each page as a picture, then your browser joins the pictures into the GIF while the screen says Making the GIF on this device, so keep the tab open until it is done. The GIF is named after your PDF: report.pdf comes back as report.gif.

We tested this PDF to GIF converter on a three-page A4 report: text and drawings on page one, a photo on page two and 30 lines of text on page three. On the preset settings it came back as a 139 KB GIF of three frames, each 794 × 1123 pixels, shown for 2 seconds apiece and playing on a loop.

Want a single picture instead? Choose Page 1 only for a still GIF of the first page, at 96, 150 or 300 DPI. For every page as a separate picture in full colour, convert PDF to PNG: you get a ZIP with one PNG per page.

Time per page offers half a second, 1, 2, 3 or 5 seconds, and starts on 2. Every page gets the same time, and after the last page the GIF starts again from the first. One pass lasts the number of pages times that time: our three pages at 2 seconds made a 6-second loop, and a 20-page PDF at 3 seconds takes a minute.

• Half a second or 1 second: a quick flick through a document, such as a brochure or a menu shown as a preview.
• 2 or 3 seconds: pages with a heading, a chart or a picture that people take in at a glance.
• 5 seconds: pages with sentences to read. Small print stays hard to read in a GIF 794 pixels wide, so choose 150 DPI for text-heavy pages.

Resolution, in dots per inch (DPI), sets how many pixels each page gets. The animation offers 96 DPI, the preset, or 150 DPI; 300 DPI comes only with the Page 1 only choice. These are the results from our three-page test PDF:

Each frame gets its own set of up to 256 colours, the most a GIF frame can hold. Our two text pages lost nothing you can see: next to PNG pictures of the same pages, no pixel was more than 12 shades out of 255 away. The photo page had 60,493 different colours as a PNG and 256 in the GIF, and its smooth background broke into visible bands.

The first page decides the shape of the whole GIF. Every later page is shrunk to fit inside that shape, whole and centred, with white filling the rest. In our test, a portrait A4 page followed by a landscape one gave two portrait frames: the landscape page was scaled down to the width of the frame, with white bands above and below it.

The same rule works the other way round. If a PDF opens with a landscape cover and carries on in portrait, every portrait page sits small in the middle of a wide frame, with white on both sides. When the pages differ, a GIF of each part, or PNG pictures of the pages, may serve you better.

• Slides: convert PowerPoint to GIF works the same way, with a Time per slide, for .pptx and .ppt decks.
• Plain text and web pages: convert text to GIF and convert HTML to GIF give still GIFs, one for each A4 page, in a ZIP when there are several. They do not animate.
• A GIF that plays once, moves faster than half a second a page, or is narrower: convert the PDF to PNG, then add the pages to Images to GIF. It runs in your browser, takes up to 100 pictures, and offers a Time per frame from 0.1 to 3 seconds, Forever, Once or 3 times, and a Width of 320 to 800 pixels.

Going the other way, convert GIF to PDF puts only the first frame on a page: our three-frame GIF came back as a one-page A4 PDF. So keep your original PDF. In the GIF every word is part of a picture, which means it cannot be selected, searched or copied. To put the words on a web page as text you can select and edit, convert PDF to HTML.