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Need help?GIF to BMP Converter
A GIF is an indexed, LZW-compressed image capped at 256 colours per frame; a BMP is a Windows device-independent bitmap that usually stores pixels raw, with no compression at all. Converting between them is a packaging change, not an upgrade — you get the same picture in the layout that older Windows software, industrial and embedded displays, and some scanning or machine-vision pipelines still expect. Because a BMP holds one image, an animated GIF comes out as a single still frame.
GIF Format at a Glance
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Specification | CompuServe GIF, version 89a (July 1989; spec document dated 31 July 1990) |
| Compression | LZW, lossless within the palette |
| Colour | 8-bit indexed — a palette of up to 256 entries, each a 24-bit RGB value |
| Transparency | One palette slot flagged as the Transparency Index; matching pixels are left undrawn (fully on or fully off, no partial alpha) |
| Animation | Yes — multiple frames, each able to carry its own palette |
| Browser support | Every version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari |
| Best for | Short loops, flat-colour graphics, reaction clips |
BMP Format at a Glance
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Specification | Windows device-independent bitmap (DIB); the modern header is BITMAPINFOHEADER |
| Bits per pixel | 1, 4, 8, 16, 24 or 32 |
| Palette rules | 1/4/8-bpp files must carry a colour table of at most 2^bpp entries — so 8-bit tops out at 256 colours; 16/24/32-bpp files normally carry none |
| 16-bpp layout | With the uncompressed BI_RGB compression flag, a 16-bit BMP is always RGB 555 — five bits each of red, green and blue |
| Compression | Usually none (BI_RGB); run-length encoding (RLE) is available for palette images |
| Row layout | Scan lines are padded to a multiple of 4 bytes and stored bottom-up by default |
| Transparency | No alpha in the common BI_RGB form |
| Browser support | Every version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari — though Mozilla advises against BMP for web content because of the file sizes |
| Best for | Legacy Windows apps, embedded and instrumentation displays, raw-raster ingest pipelines |
What Each Quality Preset Writes
This page exposes three presets, and they are not simply "more or less compression" — each one produces a structurally different bitmap.
| Preset | Pixel format | Compression | Practical effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| High (the default here) | 16 bpp, RGB 555 | None (BI_RGB) | Two bytes per pixel, no palette. The most faithful of the three for a 256-colour GIF and the largest file. |
| Medium | 8 bpp, 256-colour palette | RLE | Floyd–Steinberg dithering into a 256-entry table, metadata stripped, classic BITMAPINFOHEADER ("BMP3") output. Much smaller on flat graphics. |
| Low | 8 bpp, 86-colour palette | RLE | Floyd–Steinberg dithering into a deliberately small table. Smallest output, visible dither texture on gradients. |
There is no separate bit-depth or palette-size control on this page, and no "Specific file size" target either — for BMP output the preset is what sets the pixel format.
How to Convert GIF to BMP
- Upload Your GIF File: Drag and drop your
.gifonto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to browse for it. Several GIFs can be queued and converted with the same settings in one batch. - Pick a Quality Preset: Open Advanced Options and choose High, Medium or Low. High keeps 16-bit RGB 555 colour with no compression; Medium and Low quantise to a 256- or 86-colour palette and apply run-length encoding to shrink the file.
- Set Image Resolution (Optional): Image resolution is set to "Keep original" by default. Switch to Resolution Percentage to scale proportionally, pick a Preset Resolution, or type an exact Width, Height, or Width x Height.
- Convert and Download: Click Convert and download the
.bmp. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will converting GIF to BMP improve the image quality?
No, and it cannot. A GIF has already thrown away everything outside its 256-entry palette, so writing those same pixels into a bitmap adds no colour, sharpness or detail. The one thing that reliably changes is size — the BMP is normally much larger. If you need better quality you need a better source image; no format conversion can restore detail the GIF never stored.
Which BMP bit depth does this converter actually write?
It depends on the preset. On the High preset — the one selected by default here — the encoder is asked for the rgb555le pixel format, and the resulting bitmap header bears that out: biBitCount reads 16 and biCompression reads BI_RGB, which per Microsoft's BITMAPINFOHEADER documentation always means RGB 555. Medium and Low instead write 8-bpp palette bitmaps with run-length encoding.
Why is the BMP so much bigger than the original GIF?
Because the GIF was LZW-compressed and the default BMP is not compressed at all. At 16 bpp the arithmetic is fixed: two bytes for every pixel, so an 800×600 image occupies 960,000 bytes of pixel data (about 938 KiB) before the 54-byte header, no matter how simple the picture is. A GIF of the same image might be a few tens of kilobytes. If size matters and nothing downstream demands a bitmap, convert to PNG instead — dramatically smaller for the same picture, and it keeps transparency.
What happens to an animated GIF when I convert it to BMP?
A BMP file holds exactly one image, so the animation cannot survive — you get a single still frame rather than the moving sequence. If keeping the motion is the point, convert the GIF to MP4 for a small, widely playable clip, or convert the GIF to APNG to keep every frame in a single animated image file without GIF's 256-colour ceiling.
What happens to the transparent parts of my GIF?
They stop being transparent. GIF transparency is a single flagged palette index, and a BMP in its common BI_RGB form has no alpha channel to carry it, so those pixels are written as whatever RGB value sat underneath the transparent index in the source file — often white, sometimes black, depending on the program that produced the GIF. This page has no background-colour control to override that. If you need transparency preserved, target PNG; if you need to choose the fill colour explicitly, GIF to JPG has a Background Color option.
Why are there only three quality presets on this page?
Because the other presets have no meaning for a bitmap. Our image presets run from Highest to Lowest for compressed formats where quality maps onto an encoder setting, but BMP has no quality knob — it has a pixel format. Only three of those are wired up for BMP output here (16-bit uncompressed, 256-colour RLE, 86-colour RLE), so only High, Medium and Low appear in the dropdown.
Can I target an exact output file size, like 500 KB?
Not for BMP. The "Specific file size" mode is hidden on this page because a raw bitmap's size is determined arithmetically by dimensions and bit depth, not by an encoder that can be nudged toward a target. To make a BMP smaller you have two honest levers: pick the Medium or Low preset to drop to a palette with RLE, or reduce the pixel dimensions under Image resolution. If you want real size control, use a compressed format and the Image Compressor.
Should I use BMP or PNG for a converted GIF?
PNG, unless something specific demands .bmp. PNG keeps the GIF's transparency and produces a dramatically smaller file for the same picture — and if you want true-colour PNG output with no palette quantisation applied, choose the "Highest" quality preset on the PNG converter. BMP earns its place only when the consumer of the file is fixed — an old Windows application, an embedded panel or instrument, a document-capture or machine-vision tool that reads raw rasters directly. Choose BMP because a system requires it, not because it sounds like the higher-fidelity option.
Can I open a BMP in a web browser?
Yes. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari all decode BMP, so a converted file will display if you open it locally or link to it. That is not a reason to publish one, though — Mozilla's own image-format guidance warns against BMP on the web precisely because the uncompressed form is so much heavier than PNG or JPEG for the same picture.