GIFs already use a limited palette, which makes them some of the easiest images to vectorize. Animated GIFs are traced from their first frame.
Loading the GIF to SVG tool…
Processed on your device. Files are never uploaded.
Drop a .gif file onto the artboard.
Set the colour count to roughly the number of colours in the GIF (often 2–16).
Download the SVG or copy the code.
The GIF format stores at most 256 colours per frame, and most GIF logos and icons use far fewer. With few colours and hard edges, the tracer produces a small number of clean shapes. For pixel art, lower Curve smoothing to keep the square steps crisp.
SVG can animate, but frame-by-frame GIF animation does not map onto it cleanly. Browsers decode the first frame when an image is drawn to a canvas, so that is the frame SVGShift traces.
Not here. Only the first frame is traced. Recreating an animation in SVG means drawing each state as vectors and animating them with CSS or SMIL, which is design work rather than conversion.
Yes. Transparent GIF pixels are left out of the traced paths.
No. The image is decoded and traced by JavaScript in your own browser tab, in a background worker. Nothing is sent to a server, which is why it also works offline once the page has loaded.
A vectorizer describes every colour region as a filled path. A photo has thousands of tiny regions, so the SVG can end up larger than the original file. Vectorizing works best on logos, icons, line art, signatures and flat illustrations with a handful of colours.