Convert GIF to WebP

To convert GIF to WebP, select or drop your file on this page, keep Balanced or choose another Image quality, and press Convert to WEBP. An animation stays an animation: the new file plays every frame in order, each on screen for as long as before, and repeats the way the original did. A still GIF gives a still picture.

We tried this with real files in Chrome and Firefox. A panning photo animation of 20 frames at 40 milliseconds each came back with the same 20 at the same pace, looping forever, and a screen recording kept all 30 of its moments at a tenth of a second apiece. Width and height in pixels stay as they were, and the done screen counts what was kept.

This GIF to WebP converter works online in current Chrome, Edge and Firefox, free and with no daily limit. Everything happens in your browser, so nothing is uploaded. Add up to 100 files in one go and save them together with Download all (ZIP). If a chat app or an editor wants a GIF again later, convert WebP to GIF and the movement comes back with it.

Image quality has three settings: Smaller, Balanced (the default) and Best. All three use lossy compression, which drops detail the eye barely notices to save space; they differ in how much they drop. After the opening frame, only the area that changed is stored. In our screen recording, the second one kept a patch of 37 by 39 pixels around the moving pointer, out of a picture 800 by 500.

Balanced suits most animations. It cut our panning photo to about a seventeenth of its size and halved the screen recording, and at normal size both looked like the originals. Smaller saves a little more, but zoomed in it left faint smudges in the white space around small text. Best kept text the cleanest, so pick it for recordings with small writing, though it made the photo more than twice the size it was at Balanced. Firefox made the three animations the same as Chrome, to the byte.

Drawings in a few flat colours gain the least, because GIF already packs them tightly. Our cartoon shrank by a fifth at Balanced and grew slightly at Best, and in Chrome the tiny still logo came out larger at every setting. For a file like that, the original may already be the lighter choice.

See-through areas stay see-through. A GIF pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque, and that is exactly what comes out: in our cartoon and logo, every pixel at every step of the animation matched the original. No background colour is added.

Current browsers play animated WebP, but some older software and upload forms still refuse the format, so keep the original for those; converting leaves it as it was. If all you have is the new file, convert WebP to PNG for a still picture with its transparency, or convert WebP to JPG where only a JPG is taken. Both give the first frame.

Need one still picture from the GIF itself? Convert GIF to JPG saves its first frame, and the GIF to frames tool lets you pick any moment and save it as a WebP picture of its own. Other pictures for a website can go the same way: convert JPG to WebP for photos, or convert SVG to WebP to turn a logo drawn in SVG into pixels.