GIF to AVIF Converter — Convert Animated GIF to AVIF Online
Drop an animated GIF below and pick AVIF as the output format. Every frame, every frame delay, the loop count, and every transparent pixel come across intact. AVIF is worth it when your GIF is photographic: one nudge of the quality slider to 75% cut our test clip by 80%. When the GIF is mostly static, it is not — see the table below before you convert.
Drop images here or click to browse
Supports HEIC, WEBP, AVIF, BMP, TIFF, SVG, GIF, ICO, PDF, JPG, PNG
100% Private — Your files never leave your device
All conversion happens directly in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded to any server. Your images stay on your computer the entire time.
Animated AVIF vs. GIF: file size and browser support
Three clips, all measured through this page's own converter rather than estimated. The first two are 480 × 270 and 24 frames long: a photographic pan across this site's homepage photo, and that same photo held still with one small element moving across it. The third is a flat-colour sticker on a transparent background — the three things animated GIFs are actually used for.
| Encoding | Photographic pan | Mostly static | Transparent sticker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original GIF | 1.2 MB | 118.1 KB | 17.7 KB |
| AVIF at 92% (default) | 682.6 KB (44% smaller) | 696.8 KB (5.9× larger) | 65.4 KB (3.7× larger) |
| AVIF at 75% | 242.1 KB (80% smaller) | 273.1 KB (2.3× larger) | 51.0 KB (2.9× larger) |
| AVIF at 50% | 81.8 KB (93% smaller) | 114.0 KB (3% smaller) | 38.4 KB (2.2× larger) |
Two of those columns are mostly red ink, and that is the honest result rather than a bug to be hidden. Here is why. No browser exposes an AV1 video encoder to a web page, so this converter encodes every frame of your animation as a complete keyframe. A GIF stores only the rectangle that changed since the frame before it. On the photographic pan, where every pixel moves anyway, that costs AVIF nothing and its far better compression wins outright. On the static clip, GIF stores one small moving box per frame while AVIF re-encodes the entire photograph twenty-four times over — and loses badly, until the quality slider drops far enough to claw it back.
So the rule is simple: if the whole picture moves, AVIF at 75% is the best animated format you can produce in a browser. If most of the picture stands still — a screen recording, a caption over a fixed background, a logo — reach for GIF to WebP instead, which keeps GIF's changed-rectangle trick and turned that same static clip into a 39.0 KB file — 67% smaller than the GIF, and a seventh of what AVIF managed. Dedicated command-line encoders such as libavif's own avifenc do predict one frame from the last and do not have this limitation.
Browser support is no longer the reason to hesitate, but animated AVIF and still AVIF did not arrive together. Chrome and Edge have played animated AVIF for years. Firefox shipped still AVIF in version 93 and only enabled animation by default in 113 (May 2023). Safari showed its first still AVIF in Safari 16, but did not play an animated one until 16.4 (March 2023). Counting all AVIF support, caniuse.com puts the format at roughly 93% of global browser traffic.
One gap is worth knowing before you ship a transparent animation: Safari does not render transparency in animated AVIF correctly — a WebKit bug still open at the time of writing — and Chrome on Android has been reported to get the alpha channel wrong as well. Playback of animated AVIF is also markedly more expensive than GIF or WebP, and can drop frames on phones. The file this converter gives you is correct; some browsers are not yet. For a transparent animation today, animated WebP is the safer target.
How to Convert GIF to AVIF
- Drag your GIF into the drop zone, or click to browse and select it.
- Choose AVIF from the Output Format menu — this is the step that keeps the animation.
- Pull the Quality slider down to 75%. At the default 92% an animated AVIF is rarely worth making.
- Download the AVIF — it's saved straight to your device.
You can drop several GIFs at once and take them away together as a ZIP. Nothing is uploaded: the GIF is decoded, and each frame re-encoded, on your own machine. That work is real — roughly 70 milliseconds per 480 × 270 frame — so give a long or large animation a moment to finish.
What Survives the Conversion
- Every frame, in order, composited exactly as a browser would draw the GIF.
- Frame delays, individually — a clip that pauses on one frame still pauses.
- The loop count, whether that is three times or forever.
- Transparent pixels, written to a lossless alpha track so the hard GIF edge stays hard.
- A still cover image: the first frame is also stored as a plain AVIF image, so software that cannot play the animation shows a picture rather than an error.
- More colour headroom than the GIF ever had: AVIF is not limited to 256 colours per frame, so nothing further is lost to the palette.
Frames identical to the one before them are folded into a single longer frame rather than stored twice. What cannot survive is the saving GIF gets from redrawing only part of the screen — see the table above.
When AVIF Is the Wrong Choice
- The animation is mostly static. GIF to WebP will produce a far smaller file.
- The GIF has transparent pixels and Safari matters. WebP renders them correctly everywhere; animated AVIF does not, yet.
- The animation is long or high-resolution. Real video compression wins outright — convert the GIF to MP4 instead.
- You only wanted one frame. GIF to PNG gives you a lossless still; GIF to JPG gives you a smaller one.
- Something downstream demands a GIF. Some older chat and forum software still does; that is the one job GIF is still uniquely good at.
Not sure which format the job calls for? Our image format by use case guide walks through web, print, email, and archive, and WebP vs AVIF covers how the two modern codecs differ on animation, encode speed, and support. If you have AVIF files that a stubborn old application refuses to open, AVIF to JPG handles the return trip.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can AVIF be animated?
Yes. An AVIF file can hold a whole sequence of frames, each with its own delay, plus a loop count — the same things a GIF carries. Inside the file it is stored the way a video is, as a track of AV1 pictures, which is why an animated AVIF is still a .avif and needs no special markup to play. Support arrived later than support for still AVIF, though: Firefox only enabled animated AVIF by default in version 113 (May 2023), and Safari in 16.4 (March 2023). Chrome and Edge have played it for years.
What replaces GIF?
It depends on what the GIF is a picture of, and there is no single winner. For a photographic or video-like clip, AVIF compresses hardest — on the test clip below it removed 80% of the bytes. For flat colour, screen recordings, or anything with a still background, animated WebP is the better swap, and a real video file (MP4 or WebM) beats both by a wide margin on anything longer than a few seconds. For transparency, WebP is currently the safe choice, because Safari still renders transparent animated AVIF incorrectly. GIF's one remaining advantage is that some chat and forum software accepts nothing else.
Will my animated GIF stay animated?
Yes, as long as you pick AVIF as the output format. This converter reads every frame of the GIF, keeps each frame's delay and the loop count, and writes them into the AVIF as an image sequence. A GIF that looped forever still loops forever; one that played three times still plays three times. Choosing any other output format — JPG, PNG, BMP and the rest — gives you a still image of the first frame instead, because none of those formats can carry animation.
Is animated AVIF smaller than GIF?
For a photographic clip, dramatically. For a mostly-static one, no — it is usually larger, and that surprises people. The reason is that this converter encodes every frame as a complete keyframe, because no browser exposes an AV1 video encoder to a web page. A GIF, by contrast, stores only the rectangle that changed since the previous frame. So on a photograph where every pixel moves, AVIF wins by 80% at 75% quality; on a still background with one small moving element, where GIF has almost nothing to store, the AVIF came out 2.3 times larger at the same setting. Watch the size readout the converter prints beside your own file.
Why is my AVIF bigger than the GIF?
Almost certainly because your animation is mostly static — a screen recording, a chart, a logo, a caption over a fixed background — and the quality slider is high. Every frame here is a keyframe, so a still background is paid for again on every single frame, while the GIF stored it once. Two things help. Drop the quality slider: on our mostly-static test clip, 92% produced a file 5.9 times the size of the GIF, 75% produced 2.3 times, and 50% finally came in slightly smaller than the original. Or convert to animated WebP instead, which keeps the changed-rectangle trick that GIF uses.
Does the converter keep transparent pixels?
Yes, exactly. GIF transparency is all-or-nothing — a pixel is either fully see-through or fully opaque — and the converter writes those pixels into a separate lossless alpha track so that the hard edge survives the trip byte for byte. Be careful where you use the result, though. Safari does not render transparency in animated AVIF correctly (a WebKit bug open since 2024), and Chrome on Android has been reported to get it wrong too. If your GIF has transparent pixels, converting it to WebP instead is the safer move today.
Does converting GIF to AVIF lose quality?
AVIF is lossy at the default setting, so it does discard some detail. In practice the damage that matters was done long before you got here: GIF can only store 256 colours per frame, so a photographic GIF has already been crushed to a palette and dithered. AVIF encodes what is actually in the file — measured against the GIF's own pixels, the 75% setting scored 35.8 dB on our photographic test clip. It will not restore the colours the GIF threw away, but nothing can.
Why is converting a GIF to AVIF so slow?
Because AV1 is a computationally expensive codec and every frame of your animation goes through it separately, inside your browser. The encoder is libavif compiled to WebAssembly, and it spends roughly 70 milliseconds on each 480 × 270 frame — our 24-frame test clip converts in about 1.7 seconds, and a long, high-resolution animation can take a minute. The sequence encoder deliberately runs at a faster preset than the still-image one for this reason. Nothing is uploaded, so all of that work happens on your own machine.
Can I convert GIF to AVIF for free?
Yes. This GIF to AVIF converter is completely free with no sign-up, watermarks, or file limits. The conversion runs inside your browser, frame by frame, so your files are never uploaded to a server.