GIF is a palette of at most 256 colours, all-or-nothing transparency, and animation. PNG is lossless compression with a full 8-bit alpha channel. ImageMagick sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to a GIF file on the way to becoming a PNG one.
What runs when a GIF file becomes PNG
ImageMagick 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Your GIF file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the PNG comes back, and neither file is kept. GIF to PNG 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 PNG
The pixel dimensions of your GIF file. The PNG comes out the size the GIF went in, because nothing on this path resizes anything.
What GIF to PNG costs you
Every frame of the GIF but the first. GIF can hold an animation and PNG cannot, so frame one is what comes back. The alternative would be one numbered PNG file per frame and no single answer to hand you.
If a model is going to read the PNG
A PNG file is pixels, and pixels are expensive for a model to read. Handed this PNG, an assistant spends its budget looking at the picture rather than reading it, and it will paraphrase what it thinks it saw. If your GIF is mostly words, the useful move is to pull the text out of it, not to change which picture format holds it.
GIF to PNG, measured rather than promised
Running GIF to PNG against the real engine with a real file, ImageMagick wrote 3,894 bytes of PNG in under a tenth of a second, 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 PNG 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 PNG 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 PNG can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own GIF witness file.
GIF to PDF: 1,092,578 bytes in 0.9 seconds, verified by a format signature.
GIF to JPG: 20,559 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 PNG, and what they measured
Among the published routes into PNG, GIF is the third largest output of the 13 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
BMP to PNG: 810 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
TIFF to PNG: 815 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
PDF to PNG: 1,294 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
AVIF to PNG: 4,453 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
PSD to PNG: 689 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
What we will not pretend about GIF to PNG
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 PNG 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 PNG 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 PNG, 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 PNG: what people ask
What actually converts my GIF file to PNG?
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 PNG comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does GIF to PNG take?
On the file the probe used, ImageMagick took under a tenth of a second and wrote 3,894 bytes of PNG. 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 PNG?
The one to know about first: Every frame of the GIF but the first. GIF can hold an animation and PNG cannot, so frame one is what comes back. The alternative would be one numbered PNG file per frame and no single answer to hand you.
My GIF is animated. Will the PNG be?
No. A GIF can hold a whole sequence and a PNG holds one image, so what comes back is the first frame. The alternative would be one numbered PNG per frame, and there is no single file to hand you at the end of that.
Is GIF to PNG free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one GIF to PNG 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 PNG.