Convert GIF to WebP

Converting GIF to WebP is worth doing when the destination matters more than the source. GIF is built for short animations and simple graphics limited to 256 colours. WebP is built for web images, roughly thirty percent smaller than JPG at similar quality. Which one you want depends entirely on where the image is going next.

The only conversion here that keeps the animation. WebP supports animated images and compresses them far more efficiently than GIF, so an animated GIF frequently becomes a fraction of its original size while looking better, since it escapes the 256 colour limit.

WebP compresses by discarding detail, so this conversion trades some fidelity for a much smaller file. At high quality settings the difference is invisible in photographs, though flat colour and sharp text can show artefacts. Keep the GIF original as your master copy.

WebP has a lossless mode, which is the mode to use here. It beats PNG by roughly twenty to thirty percent while keeping every pixel exactly, so you get a genuinely smaller file with nothing given up. Current browsers all read it, though older desktop software may not.

GIF stores an indexed palette rather than full colour values, so decoding expands those indices back into real pixels. Where the file holds several frames, the first is taken unless the target format supports animation.

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