Animated WebP is a modern replacement for GIF: full colour, transparency with soft edges, and much better compression. Converting a GIF to WebP usually makes it smaller, even without losing a single pixel.
How to convert GIF to animated WebP
- Upload the GIF (up to 100 MB).
- Convert to: Animated WebP is selected, with Lossless quality.
- Download the WebP.
Lossless or lossy?
- Lossless keeps every pixel of every frame exactly. Because a GIF already has at most 256 colours per frame, lossless WebP compresses it well, and the result is usually smaller than the GIF.
- High and Balanced (lossy) compress much further. They suit GIFs made from videos or photos; for pixel art, text and flat graphics, lossless looks cleaner.
What is kept
- Frame delays, including animations whose frames have different durations.
- The loop count: forever, or the number of times the GIF plays.
- Transparency: transparent GIF pixels are transparent in the WebP.
Where to use it
Current web browsers show animated WebP in an <img> tag like a GIF. Some older programs,
e-mail clients and upload forms only accept GIF, so keep the GIF for those.
Tips
- Browsers show GIF frames with delays under 1/50 s for 1/10 s; the WebP gets that 1/10 s delay, so it plays at the same speed as the GIF did.
- To turn the animation into a video instead, choose MP4 or WebM video: usually smaller still, and accepted where animated pictures aren't.
More about what this tool reads and writes: GIF to MP4 Converter.