GIF is a palette of at most 256 colours, all-or-nothing transparency, and animation. PDF is a frozen page layout with no heading structure a machine can rely on. ImageMagick sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to a GIF file on the way to becoming a PDF one.
What runs when a GIF file becomes PDF
ImageMagick 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Your GIF file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the PDF comes back, and neither file is kept. GIF to PDF is one of the 3649 pairs that engine was probed on with a real file, which is why it has a page here and why the pairs the probe could not prove do not.
What survives from the GIF into the PDF
The pixel dimensions of your GIF file. The PDF comes out the size the GIF went in, because nothing on this path resizes anything.
What GIF to PDF costs you
Transparency. PDF has no alpha channel, so the engine composites your GIF image onto white before encoding. Without that step ImageMagick lays black underneath, and a transparent GIF logo comes back as a black rectangle.
The chance of getting text out. The PDF you receive is one page with your GIF picture painted on it. Words inside the GIF stay pixels, and nothing reading that PDF will find them.
If a model is going to read the PDF
Worth knowing before the PDF goes anywhere near an assistant: this is the wrong direction for that. A PDF is a set of positioned glyphs, and a model has to reconstruct the reading order before it can begin. If a machine rather than a person is going to read this GIF file, convert it to Markdown instead and skip the reconstruction entirely.
GIF to PDF, measured rather than promised
Running GIF to PDF against the real engine with a real file, ImageMagick wrote 1,092,578 bytes of PDF in 0.9 seconds, machine otherwise idle. That is one GIF file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The GIF to PDF verdict was reached by a format signature, meaning at least four bytes unique to the format were found at the right offset. Which check was used matters, because they do not all prove the same thing, and a status code of 200 proves nothing whatsoever about whether the PDF file has anything inside it.
The same GIF file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of a GIF file, so the cost of choosing PDF can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own GIF witness file.
GIF to JPG: 20,559 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
GIF to PNG: 3,894 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
GIF to TIFF: 848,536 bytes in 0.2 seconds, verified by a format signature.
GIF to MP4: 54,682 bytes in 0.3 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
GIF to WEBM: 49,644 bytes in 2.0 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
GIF to AVI: 164,982 bytes in 0.2 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
Other ways into PDF, and what they measured
Among the published routes into PDF, GIF is the first largest output of the 26 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
HEIF to PDF: 94,782 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
ICO to PDF: 95,344 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
DOCX to PDF: 11,917 bytes in 1.2 seconds.
DOC to PDF: 11,917 bytes in 1.1 seconds.
XLSX to PDF: 18,965 bytes in 1.1 seconds.
What we will not pretend about GIF to PDF
A GIF file over 25 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
A GIF to PDF run that passes 30 seconds is killed, and the ImageMagick process is killed with it. A run left behind would sit on one of the machine's two cores until somebody noticed.
No text is read out of the GIF anywhere on this path. Converting a picture to PDF never turns it into words, whatever the picture happens to contain.
ImageMagick was not saturated at sixteen simultaneous conversions: it held 47.5 a second while latency moved from 0.22 s to 0.34 s, and the service memory did not move off 51 MB. That is the measured headroom behind GIF to PDF, not a marketing number.
One GIF file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
GIF to PDF: what people ask
What actually converts my GIF file to PDF?
ImageMagick does it, 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Not a browser trick and not somebody else service: the GIF file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the PDF comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does GIF to PDF take?
On the file the probe used, ImageMagick took 0.9 seconds and wrote 1,092,578 bytes of PDF. That is one real measurement on one real GIF file, not an average and not a promise about yours: a larger GIF takes longer, and past 30 seconds the run is stopped.
What do I lose going from GIF to PDF?
The one to know about first: Transparency. PDF has no alpha channel, so the engine composites your GIF image onto white before encoding. Without that step ImageMagick lays black underneath, and a transparent GIF logo comes back as a black rectangle.
Can I put several GIF files into one PDF?
No. One GIF file goes in and one PDF comes out, with that picture on it. Nothing here merges files, orders them or numbers pages: it is one upload, one conversion, one download, and that is the whole of what this page does.
Is GIF to PDF free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one GIF to PDF conversion costs half a credit against it. When the allowance runs out the tool says so and stops, rather than quietly handing you a worse PDF.