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AVIF to GIF converter

Convert AVIF images to GIF format

No watermarkFree & unlimited
All processing happens in your browser. No data is sent to any server.

Nearly forty years separate these two formats, and the conversion shows it. An AVIF describes millions of colours with a modern video-derived codec; the GIF written here describes at most 216, chosen from a fixed web-safe cube with no dithering to smooth the transitions. On a photograph that produces obvious banding, and no setting here avoids it. The reason to do it anyway is reach: a GIF renders in software that has never heard of AVIF, including a great deal of email, forum and legacy tooling.

Key facts about AVIF to GIF converter

Key facts about AVIF to GIF converter
Colour reductionFrom potentially millions of colours to a fixed 216-entry cube at multiples of 51 per channel. The palette cannot adapt to an image dominated by one hue.
No ditheringEach pixel takes its nearest cube colour independently. Flat graphics stay crisp; skies, skin tones and gradients band into visible steps.
Transparency is lostThe writer emits no graphic control extension, so no index is marked transparent and a transparent AVIF comes out on black.
AnimationAn AVIF image sequence is reduced to one frame by the canvas, and a single image descriptor is written, so the GIF is a still.
Size behaviourOften larger than the AVIF. LZW over one index per pixel cannot compete with AV1, so a 120 KB full HD AVIF can become a two megabyte GIF.
Fixed overhead792 bytes before any pixel data: the GIF89a signature, the logical screen descriptor, the complete 768-byte colour table and the image descriptor.
Decoding requirementAny browser with an AV1 image decoder: Chrome 85 upward, Firefox 93 upward, Safari 16 upward. Otherwise the page reports a load failure.
Opens the resultEvery browser, email client, chat application, wiki, forum and image viewer ever written. Nothing has a wider installed base.

What happens to your file

The GIF is manufactured in your tab and never touches a server. Your AVIF is exposed as an object URL and decoded by the browser's own AV1 still-image decoder inside an Image element, then drawn onto a canvas this page created. Everything after that is JavaScript running in the page: the nearest-colour search against the web-safe cube, the LZW compressor, and the byte writer that emits the GIF89a blocks.

About this tool

  1. 1

    Load the AVIF

    Drop a .avif file onto the target area or click to browse. Twenty files per batch, 500 MB apiece.

  2. 2

    Reduce the dimensions

    The palette search runs per pixel, so a preset capping the long edge both speeds up the conversion and shrinks the output.

  3. 3

    Convert

    Press Convert. Large images take longer here than for other targets because of the per-pixel colour matching.

  4. 4

    Inspect and download

    Check skies and skin tones in the side-by-side view, then save the .gif or take converted-gif-files.zip.

Specs & compatibility
Input and outputTakes .avif only (image/avif) and returns .gif with the image/gif type; any other extension is refused before decoding.
Conversion pathAVIF to GIF runs in three steps: an <img> element decodes the AVIF, which the browser itself must be new enough to read; the pixels land on a 2D canvas in this tab; then getImageData feeds a palette mapper and an LZW encoder that live in the page.
Browser supportThe AVIF side needs Chrome 85, Firefox 93 or Safari 16.4 to decode, while writing the GIF needs nothing from the browser, the encoder shipping inside the page.
Controls for this pairNo quality slider, GIF not being a lossy target here, so the max-dimension presets from 3840 down to 200 px are the only way to hold the GIF down in size against the AVIF.
Batch, caps and namingTwenty AVIF files per run at 500 MB each; one result downloads as a single GIF, several as converted-gif-files.zip, zipped by JSZip 3.10 in page memory.
Device ceilingThe canvas caps it: past roughly 16,384 px a side Chromium refuses the bitmap and iPhone Safari gives up sooner, so an oversized AVIF fails before any GIF bytes exist.
  • Illustrations, diagrams and screenshots survive this conversion well; photographs generally do not.
  • With no dithering, cropping tightly to a subject with few distinct colours gives a far better result than a busy scene.
  • If the GIF comes out larger than the AVIF, that is expected; LZW has nothing to offer against a modern codec.
  • For an image with a transparent background, convert to PNG unless you are prepared for that background to be black.
  • Browser AV1 decode into a 2D canvas
  • Fixed web-safe 216-colour quantisation
  • LZW compression performed by page JavaScript
  • Twenty files per run, zipped in the browser
  • Posting a modern web image into a forum, wiki or ticketing system that refuses unfamiliar formats.
  • Embedding a graphic in an email template where AVIF support is unlikely.
  • Producing a compatible copy of a diagram for locked-down machines.
216 colours is not enough for a photograph and the encoder does not dither. Every pixel is mapped to the nearest point on a cube whose steps are 51 values apart per channel, so a smooth sky becomes hard bands. A dedicated encoder would build a palette from your image and hide the steps; this one does neither.
Very often. AVIF uses AV1 intra prediction and can describe a full HD photograph in around a hundred kilobytes. GIF stores one palette index per pixel and compresses those with LZW, a scheme from 1984 and no match for a modern codec. On flat graphics it is closer.
No, the background becomes black. GIF can mark one palette index transparent through a graphic control extension, but this encoder never writes that block, and a fully transparent canvas pixel reads back as zero in all channels. Use PNG or WebP instead.
No. AVIF does support image sequences, but the canvas captures a single frame and the writer emits one image descriptor with no frame timing, so the result is always a still. Producing an animated GIF needs a tool that decodes every frame and muxes them, such as ffmpeg with a generated palette.
The encoder always writes the complete 768-byte global colour table plus roughly 24 bytes of headers first, whether your image uses two colours or two hundred. For a tiny graphic that overhead dominates the file, though above a few thousand pixels it is negligible.

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