GIF to PDF Converter

In Short

Add your GIF files, put them in order, choose a paper size, press Convert Images to PDF, then Download PDF. Each GIF becomes one still page. Animations are not preserved: a PDF page is static, so only a single frame of an animated GIF ends up in the document. Files are processed on the newisty.com server, each GIF may be up to 12 MB, and you do not need an account or email address.

Who Converts GIFs to PDF, and Why

GIF is older than most of the web and still everywhere. You find it in:

• Simple charts, flow diagrams and org charts exported by older office or diagram software.
• Logos and icons from legacy websites with limited colour palettes.
• Scanned fax pages and black-and-white line drawings saved by archive systems.
• Reaction images and short animations collected for a presentation or a report about online culture.
• Maps and floor plans saved by older intranet tools.

Putting these into a PDF makes them printable on any printer, attachable to forms that only take PDF, and easy to keep together with a report. Teachers use it to print diagram sheets, researchers to archive web graphics with a document, and office staff to turn old GIF scans into something a modern system accepts.

How GIF Behaves in a PDF

One frame only

The PDF library reads the GIF through PHP's GD extension, which loads a single image from the file, the first frame of an animation. The resulting page shows that frame. If the frame you want is in the middle of the animation, extract it with an image editor or take a screenshot at the right moment, save it, and convert that still image instead.

Colours stay exactly as they are

GIF images are limited to a palette of up to 256 colours. Inside the PDF the decoded pixels are stored as lossless PNG-style data, so those colours are kept precisely; nothing is smoothed or compressed further. Flat-colour diagrams look exactly like the source. Conversely, the converter cannot add colours the GIF never had, so a photo that was squeezed into GIF will still show banding.

Transparent areas

A GIF can mark one colour as transparent. On the PDF page, those areas show the white page behind them.

Quality setting

Because GIF is stored losslessly, the Quality box on each card has no visible effect on GIF pages.

Where Each Part Runs

The page in your browser shows a thumbnail per GIF, counts the files, and lets you reorder or remove them. It does not build the PDF itself. On Convert Images to PDF, the GIF files and your settings are uploaded to the server, validated by Laravel (allowed types are JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP and BMP, each up to 12 MB), copied to a temporary folder and assembled into a PDF with the tc-lib-pdf library. The temporary GIF copies are deleted immediately afterwards. The PDF is written to a temporary folder under a random UUID-based name, and the site's hourly cleanup deletes temporary files that are more than an hour old.

Before You Press Convert: A Checklist

• Every file has a unique name. The page skips a second file with an identical name and says so in the status line.
• Each GIF is under 12 MB. Long, high-resolution animations can be larger than that even though only one frame is used; extract the frame first.
• The cards are in reading order. Drag a card by its grip handle to move it.
• Wide diagrams are set to Landscape on their own card.
• Paper size matches where the PDF is going: A4 or Letter for printing, A3 or Tabloid for a large diagram, A5 for small handouts. Legal is also available.

Walkthrough: Turning a Set of Diagrams Into a Handout

Say you have six GIF diagrams for a workshop. Click Select Images, choose all six, and watch the Images badge reach 6. Drag the overview diagram to the top. In Image to PDF Settings, leave Default Format on A4, set Default Orientation to Landscape because most diagrams are wide, and press Apply defaults to all images. One diagram is tall, so on its card switch Orientation back to Portrait. Press Convert Images to PDF. When the status changes to "PDF created. Click download to save it.", press Download PDF and rename the file to something like workshop-diagrams.pdf.

Small GIFs and Page Size

Many GIFs are tiny, say 200 by 150 pixels. With automatic placement (W and H left at 0 under Advanced options), the image is scaled up until it fits the page and is centred, which makes small icons look large and blocky. To keep a small GIF small, enter a width in millimetres in W; the height follows the image's proportions. X and Y / Top set where its top-left corner sits, measured from the page's top-left corner. For instance W = 50, X = 80, Y / Top = 30 puts a 50 mm wide logo roughly centred at the top of portrait A4.

The other advanced fields (Type, Align, Page Align, Resize, Border, Fit Box, Link, Img Mask, Hidden, Is mask and Alt image), the Fit on page checkbox and the DPI box are collected by the page but the current server does not use them when drawing.

Mixing GIFs With Other Images

A diagram set rarely arrives in one format. If some of your figures are PNG or JPG, add them to the same batch; each file still becomes its own page, in the order of the cards. That way a report appendix with a GIF flowchart, a PNG screenshot and a JPG photo ends up as one tidy PDF rather than three separate files.

What This Tool Will Not Do

• It will not keep animation, show multiple frames or let you pick a frame.
• It will not put several GIFs on one page; it is one image per page.
• It will not recognise text in a scanned GIF; there is no OCR.
• It will not add margins, borders, rotation, page numbers or a password.
• It will not accept file types beyond the six listed, even though the file picker lets you choose them.

Don't

Don't upload GIFs containing private information you are not allowed to send to an external server. Don't expect a PDF made from a low-colour GIF photo to look like the original photograph. Don't leave the PDF on the server and come back tomorrow; it is cleaned up after about an hour. If you later need to turn PDF pages back into GIF images, the PDF to GIF converter does that, and for mixed image batches see the Image to PDF converter without email.

Frequently Asked Questions