Seems some modern software have forgotten that GIF is not always a video format, it was once used for single-frame graphics like jpeg, yet smaller file size and much less lossy when using a small number of flat colors. Nowadays I have to convert them to PNG to fully use them properly.

@Mycroft Yeah, that bugged me, too. PNG is wasteful when you're sharing images with fewer than ~100 colors. Gif can be lossless at low enough bitrates. There's no benefit to converting.

@mawr @Mycroft It is possible to reduce PNG to 8-bit or less color depth using an indexed mode similar to GIF, where it should either be smaller or about the same size as the original GIF. Agree that there's no real benefit to converting other than to appease brain-dead software though.

@skquinn @Mycroft I always use full bitrate PNG, as I've encountered devices which refuse to parse 8bit PNGs. If I were using 8bit PNG, the difference in size would be approximately moot, but the rest of the argument stands. ^^

@mawr @Mycroft Anything that chokes on indexed PNGs isn't truly PNG compliant, i.e. it's a bug in the software on that device, and needs to be reported and fixed.

@skquinn @Mycroft I'm fairly sure this is an old habit of mine born years and years ago during the early years of PNG adoption that I've needlessly kept up X3

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@mawr @skquinn ha, probably similar to, way back when I was encoding mp3s, to make sure not to use VBR and a couple other settings I forgot because some of my devices didn't support it.

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