GIF to PDF Converter

1Drop your GIFs inIt never leaves your machine.

2Set the pageEverything updates as you change it.

3Build and downloadAssembled here and saved from your own browser.

The first frame, at full quality

An animated GIF cannot animate on paper, so the first frame is used. Its limited palette is preserved exactly rather than being smoothed away.

How to use this tool

Drop your GIF files onto the box at the top, or click it to browse. Each becomes a page, in the order the thumbnails show, and you can drag a thumbnail onto another to move it.

Set the paper and margin, then check the preview. Each thumbnail carries the effective print resolution of that image at the size you have chosen.

If any of your files are animated, only the first frame is used, and the page will show you exactly what that frame looks like before you commit.

Animation does not survive, and cannot

This is the thing worth being clear about, because it is the most common surprise. A GIF can hold many frames and play them in a loop. A PDF page is a fixed image. There is no version of this conversion where the animation comes through.

So the first frame is what goes in. Not a frame chosen for being representative, not a blend, simply the first one the file declares. That is what a browser draws when it is asked to render a GIF as a still, and it is what you will see in the thumbnail here before you build anything.

Sometimes the first frame is not the useful one. Screen recordings often begin on a blank or half drawn state, so the frame you want is somewhere in the middle. In that case the honest answer is to open the GIF in something that can step through frames, export the one you need as a PNG, and convert that.

The 256 colour limit is already baked in

A GIF stores at most 256 distinct colours, chosen when the file was created. Everything else in the original image was mapped onto the nearest of those, and the discarded colours are gone.

On flat graphics, logos and simple diagrams that is plenty and you would never notice. On a photograph or anything with a gradient it produces visible banding, those stepped bands across a sky or a shadow, and often a speckled dither pattern where the encoder tried to fake the missing shades.

Nothing downstream can undo that, which is the practical point. If a GIF of a photograph looks banded here, it looked banded before it arrived, and the fix is to find the original rather than to change any setting on this page. It is also why an opaque GIF is re-encoded as JPEG on the way in: with only 256 colours present there is nothing for JPEG to damage that the palette has not already removed.

A worked check you can repeat

Take a 3000 by 2000 pixel image onto A4 portrait with a 10 mm margin, set to Whole image.

A4 is 595.28 by 841.89 points. The margin is 10 times 72 divided by 25.4, which is 28.35 points a side, leaving 538.59 by 785.20. The image aspect ratio is 1.5 against a box of 0.686, so width is the limit and the scale is 538.59 divided by 3000, or 0.17953.

The picture lands 538.59 wide by 359.06 tall, filling the width and centred vertically with 213.07 points above and below. Effective resolution is 3000 pixels across 7.48 inches, about 401 dpi.

Every figure above was checked against an independent implementation before publishing, along with the page presets against their real dimensions, orientation switching, the fill and stretch modes and margins larger than the paper. The first frame behaviour was confirmed by building a two frame animated GIF and checking which frame a canvas actually captures.

Mistakes that catch people out

Expecting the animation to work. A PDF page does not move. If the animation is the content, a PDF is the wrong container entirely.

Assuming the first frame is the right frame. On a screen recording it often is not. Check the thumbnail before you build.

Blaming the converter for banding. The colour loss happened when the GIF was made. Find the original if you need better.

Expecting soft transparent edges. GIF transparency is all or nothing per pixel, so edges are jagged rather than smooth. PNG is the format for a clean edge.

Turning quality up to fix a soft image. Quality controls compression, not pixel count. If the badge says 73 dpi, use a smaller page or a bigger original.

Common questions

Is my GIF uploaded anywhere?

No. The images are read by your browser, the PDF is assembled here on the page, and the download comes from your own machine. Nothing crosses the network, so there is nothing on a server to store or delete.

What happens to an animated GIF?

Only the first frame goes into the PDF. A page in a document does not move, so there is no animation to preserve. If you need a particular frame, save that frame first and convert it instead.

Why do my colours look flat or banded?

Because a GIF can only hold 256 colours. That limit was applied when the file was made, so the banding is already in your source. Converting cannot restore colours that were discarded.

Does GIF transparency survive?

Yes. GIF transparency is on or off per pixel rather than gradual, so edges can look jagged, but it is preserved if you choose a transparent background.

Is this the right format to be converting from?

Often not. If the original was a photograph, find that instead: a GIF of a photograph has already lost most of its colour. GIF earns its place on simple graphics and short animations.

Can I mix GIF with other formats?

Yes. Drop in JPG, PNG, WebP and BMP alongside them and they all become pages in the same document, in whatever order you arrange the thumbnails.

Related PDF tools and reference

Reference: ISO 216, the standard that defines the A series paper sizes used here.