gif2png

The gif2png application was designed to be a small command line tool that will convert images from the legally encumbered, obsolete Graphics Interchange Format (.gif) to free, optimized and usually much smaller Portable Network Graphics (.png) files.

The .gif format is old. Unisys hold patents on the compression techniques it uses, meaning corporations implementing .gif have to pay royalties. Even though "normal" users and webmasters do not have to pay to use it, do you really want to be supporting software patents by continuing use of .gif?

However the most important factor when converting from .gif to .png is file size. Typically a .png is 10-20% smaller than the original .gif and in some cases as much as 50-75%! Factor that in to a website which primarily consists of .gif images and you can make substantial savings on your bandwidth bill, as well as having your site load faster for users on slower dialup links. Keep in mind conversion from .gif to .png is lossless, meaning you're getting file size savings without any quality loss! How good a deal is that?

But PNG is incompatible! My images will break in half the browsers! Disappointing browser support for PNG has been the excuse of many webmasters not to convert, however the browsers in use by 99.9% of all your visitors will support PNG images. Internet Explorer 4.0+, Netscape 4+, Mozilla, Konqueror, KMeleon, Safari and many more all support standard 8 bit PNG images with transparency just fine.

If you're worried about your images which use transparency because you have heard about "Internet Explorer doesn't support PNG transparency properly" etc, you need not be. IE DOES have issues with transparent PNGs, but only on 24 bit PNG images with an alpha transparency channel. Since .gif files are only 8 bit and indexed transparency, converting to 8 bit PNG files with indexed transparency is a very easy transition to make.