GIF keeps 256 colours and the first frame only
GIF dates from CompuServe in 1987 and stores at most 256 colours per frame in a palette. AVIF can hold millions of colours at 10 or 12 bits per channel. So a photo with a sky or a soft shadow comes out of this conversion with visible banding, while a logo, a chart or a screenshot with a few flat colours comes out clean.
An animated AVIF doesn't become an animated GIF here. Our converter keeps only the first frame, so the result is a still image. GIF can mark a pixel only as fully clear or fully solid, so it can't hold soft edges. For a transparent background, use AVIF to PNG.
How to convert AVIF to GIF
- Upload the AVIF file, or up to 5 files at once, each up to 300 MB.
- Select GIF as the output format.
- Download the GIF when the conversion finishes on our servers.
When GIF is still the right choice
Choose GIF when the place you are uploading to accepts nothing else, such as an old forum avatar field or a CMS from the 2000s. For a photo you want small and shareable, AVIF to JPG or AVIF to WebP keeps the full colour range and often gives a smaller file than GIF. All other targets are listed on the AVIF converter page, and the GIF hub covers everything that goes into or out of GIF.