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.
Keep the clip short
Every frame is stored as a full lossless picture, so file size grows in a straight line with frame count. Three seconds at 10 fps and 360 px wide is a sensible starting point. If the result is too heavy, drop the width first — it saves more than cutting the frame rate and looks better than doing both.
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
Why does it save as .png and not .apng?
An APNG is a PNG file with extra animation chunks, and browsers only animate it when it is served as .png. The .apng extension is not widely recognised, so .png is the right choice.
Why is my APNG so much bigger than a GIF?
Because nothing is thrown away. GIF gets small by cutting to 256 colours; APNG keeps every one. For photographic video that costs a lot of bytes — for flat-colour screen recordings the difference is small and the quality gain is obvious.
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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