What converting actually gains you
The colours already lost when the GIF was made do not come back — that damage is baked in. What you do gain is a file that will not lose anything further, and clean alpha instead of GIF's hard-edged one-bit transparency, which is what causes those ugly white fringes when a GIF is placed on a coloured background.
So convert when the GIF is a step in your pipeline rather than the end of it, or when the fringing is the problem you are trying to solve.
APNG versus GIF
GIF is limited to 256 colours per frame and its transparency is a single on/off bit, which is why gradients band and edges look ragged. APNG is a PNG that moves: 16 million colours and a full alpha channel, so soft shadows and anti-aliased edges stay clean over any background.
The trade is size. PNG compression is lossless, so an APNG of photographic video is usually larger than the equivalent GIF. It shines on screen recordings, UI demos, line art and logos — anything with flat colour and sharp edges.
Where APNG plays
Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all animate APNG natively, and so do iOS and Android. Because the file is a valid PNG, anything that does not understand the animation simply shows the first frame instead of a broken image. Save it with a .png extension — that is what browsers expect.
The gap is older desktop software. Some image editors and chat clients still treat an APNG as a still PNG.
Frequently asked questions
Will the animation still loop?
Yes. Loop forever is the default, and you can set a fixed number of plays instead.
Does the speed change?
No. Each frame's delay is read from the GIF and written into the APNG unchanged, including uneven timing where some frames are held longer than others.
Is my file uploaded?
No. Frames are read and the APNG is written by JavaScript in your browser — the file never leaves your device.
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