Why do my photos look posterized?

GIF only supports 256 colors per frame. Photos use millions, so banding and color shifts are unavoidable when you downsample. That's a limit of the format.

Can I make an animated GIF here?

Not yet. Each output is a single still frame. For multi-frame GIFs, use a dedicated animator.

JPG to GIF

Maps a JPG photo down to GIF's 256 colors, so expect a posterized look.

What this does

This decodes each JPG and quantizes it to a 256-color palette, then encodes a single-frame GIF. Photos use millions of colors, so mapping down to 256 gives a posterized look — that's the GIF format's limit, not a flaw in the conversion.

How it works

1Drop your JPG images.
2Each one gets quantized to a 256-color palette and encoded as GIF.
3Download each result, or grab them all as a zip.

Built with open source

gifenc — Fast GIF encoding with color quantization. · MIT

Frequently asked questions

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