Convert GIF to BMP
Free online converter for GIF files. Uncompressed Windows bitmap. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
Drag and drop your files
or
Upload a GIF file to convert it to BMP. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About GIF and BMP
GIF .gif
A 1987 format that survives for one reason: it animates, and it plays everywhere without a video player. Its palette is capped at 256 colours per frame.
Good for
- Animation that works in any browser and any chat app
- Lossless within its 256-colour palette
- Universally supported after nearly four decades
Trade-offs
- 256 colours means visible banding on photographs
- Transparency is on-or-off per pixel, so edges look jagged
- Far larger than a real video file for the same clip
image/gif
BMP .bmp
Microsoft's plain bitmap. It generally stores pixels with no compression at all, which makes it simple to read and very large on disk.
Good for
- Dead simple — every pixel stored literally
- No compression artefacts of any kind
- Reliably readable by old Windows software
Trade-offs
- Enormous files, often ten times a PNG of the same image
- Effectively unusable on the web
- Transparency support is inconsistent between readers
image/bmp
GIF and BMP side by side
| GIF | BMP | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossless, 256-colour palette | Uncompressed |
| Transparency | Yes — 1-bit, no partial | Limited — 32-bit variants only |
| Animation | Yes | No |
| Typically used for | Short loops, reaction clips, simple animations | Legacy Windows software, intermediate working files |
What changes when you convert GIF to BMP
Only the first frame survives
A GIF is usually an animation, and BMP holds a single still image — so the result is the first frame and the rest is discarded. To keep the motion, convert to a video format instead, or to a still format that animates.
The palette does not grow
A GIF holds at most 256 colours per frame, and BMP can hold millions — but the colours your GIF discarded when it was made do not come back. Any banding you can see in the GIF will still be there afterwards, stored in a format capable of much more.
Expect a very large file
BMP generally stores every pixel with no compression at all, so the result is often several times the size of the GIF it came from while looking exactly the same. It is worth choosing only for old Windows software that will not read anything else.
How the BMP is written
Our default is stored as plain uncompressed pixels, since that is essentially all BMP offers. The quality control on the converter moves this if you need to — the default aims to be indistinguishable from the source at a sensible file size, rather than to win a compression benchmark.
Nothing is lost in this step
Both GIF and BMP store every pixel exactly, so this conversion changes the container rather than the content. What changes is file size and what will open it — convert freely, and as often as you like, without degrading anything.
Other GIF conversions
Other ways to get BMP
Worth reading next
Where your transparent background went
Transparency is the property most often lost silently in a conversion — the file looks perfect until it lands on a coloured background and grows a white rectangle.
5 min read
Why your PNG is so much bigger than your JPEG
The same photograph can be 300 KB as a JPEG and 4 MB as a PNG. Here is what each format is actually doing, and how to tell which one your file wants to be.
7 min read