GIF to BMP converter
Convert GIF images to BMP in your browser.
Processed in your browser. This file is converted on your device and is never uploaded.
Converter
.gif up to 50 MB. You can also drag a file here.
No file selected.
About this tool
GIF is an old format that survives because of animation and its wide support. BMP is uncompressed and trivially simple, which is occasionally what a piece of legacy software insists on.
This tool converts GIF to BMP entirely in your browser. The image is decoded, drawn, and re-encoded on your device, so nothing is uploaded and the size of the file costs you no waiting.
Supported formats and limits
- Input
- .gif
- Output
- .bmp (image/bmp)
- Output name
- The original name with the new extension, for example photo.gif becomes photo.bmp.
- File size limit
- 50 MB
- Processing
- In your browser. The file is not uploaded.
GIF against BMP
| Feature | GIF | BMP |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossless | None, stored as written |
| Colour | A palette of 256 colours | 8 bits per channel |
| Transparency | One colour, on or off | None |
| Animation | Yes | No |
| Keeps EXIF | No | No |
| Browser support | Every browser since 1993 | Every browser since 1995 |
| Size of a photograph | Not a format for photographs | 8 to 20 times a JPG |
| Published | 1987 | 1990 |
When you would want this
You want one picture out of the sequence
GIF can hold a whole animation and BMP holds a single image, so this conversion is how you get a poster frame, a thumbnail, or a still to put in a document. It takes the first frame. If you want all of them as separate files, the animated GIF to PNG frames tool does that instead.
How to use it
- Choose a .gif file, or drag one onto the page.
- Choose the colour that replaces any transparency.
- Optionally set a width or height to resize at the same time.
- Select Convert, then download the BMP file.
Limitations
- Only the first frame of an animated GIF is converted. Frame extraction is not part of this tool.
- GIF holds at most 256 colours, so a GIF made from a photograph has already lost most of its colour information before it reaches this tool.
- The output is uncompressed 24-bit BMP, so the file is large: roughly three bytes per pixel regardless of the picture.
- 24-bit BMP has no transparency, so transparent areas are filled with the background colour you choose.
- Metadata is not preserved. EXIF fields, including camera settings and GPS location, are dropped, which is a privacy benefit but worth knowing if you rely on them.
- Colour profiles are not preserved, so an image in a wide-gamut profile may shift slightly.
- The camera's EXIF orientation is applied, so a photo taken sideways comes out upright rather than rotated.
Common problems
The transparent background came out black or white
BMP has no alpha channel, so there is nowhere to record that a pixel was see-through. Every transparent pixel in your GIF has to become some actual colour.
Set the background colour before converting, so the flattening happens against the colour you want rather than a default. If the transparency has to survive, convert to PNG instead of BMP.
Only the first frame came out
GIF can hold a sequence of frames and BMP holds exactly one picture. There is nowhere in a BMP to put the rest, so the first frame is what gets written.
Use the animated GIF to PNG frames tool if you want every frame as a separate image. To keep the animation itself, convert to WebP, which can hold one.
Other ways to do this
The program already on your computer
Paint on Windows, Preview on macOS, GIMP will open a GIF and save it as BMP, and if you have one of them installed and only one file to convert, that is a perfectly good answer. It stays on your machine the same way this does. Where it stops being convenient is a folder of forty files, or a machine you do not own.
ImageMagick, from a terminal
One command converts a directory: magick mogrify -format BMP *.GIF. If you already have it installed this is the fastest way to do a hundred files, and it scripts. It is also a dependency to install and a syntax to learn, which is a poor trade for converting one image once.
An online converter that uploads
Most sites offering this send your file to a server, convert it there, and give you a link back. They can do formats a browser cannot, which is a real advantage. The cost is that your file was on somebody else's machine, governed by a retention policy you did not read. That is the whole difference here: this page converts GIF to BMP using code your browser already downloaded, so there is no server holding it afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my image uploaded?
- No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser. The image never leaves your device and no request carrying it is made.
- What happens to transparent areas?
- BMP cannot store transparency, so transparent and semi-transparent pixels are composited onto the background colour before encoding. The default is white.
- Does converting to BMP lose any quality?
- The conversion itself does not. BMP is lossless, so every pixel it is handed is written exactly as it arrived and nothing is discarded on the way. What it cannot do is recover detail your GIF had already lost before it got here: a lossless format preserves what it is given, it does not restore what is gone.
- What happens to the animation?
- GIF can hold a sequence of frames, and this conversion writes the first one. There is no way to fold an animation into a single still image, so the choice is which frame, and the first is the one that makes sense as a thumbnail. To keep every frame as its own file, use the animated GIF to PNG frames tool instead.
- Can I resize while converting?
- Yes. Set a width, a height, or both. With proportions kept, one dimension is derived from the other, and giving both fits the image inside that box rather than distorting it.
- Do I need to install anything or create an account to use GIF to BMP converter?
- No, to all of it. GIF to BMP converter runs inside the browser you already have, with no sign-up, no download, no watermark on the result, and no cap on how many files you convert. There is nothing to uninstall afterwards either, because nothing was installed.
- Does GIF to BMP converter work offline?
- Once the page has loaded, yes. The conversion runs on your device, so it needs no connection to do the work. The first visit fetches the page and the code that does the converting; after that a lost connection stops nothing, and a converted file appears exactly as it would online.
- How large a file can GIF to BMP converter handle?
- The limit is 50 MB. It is a deliberate one rather than a technical ceiling: the real constraint is memory, and a file that decodes to more than the device can hold fails in a way that is hard to explain. Phones run out well before laptops do, which is why the limit is set where it is.
- Can I convert several files at once with GIF to BMP converter?
- Not here: this tool takes one file at a time, because what it does depends on choices you make about that particular file. Convert them one after another, or look at the batch converters in the same category, which are built for a folder at a time.