Combine still frames into an animated PNG with full colour and transparency.
Make Animated PNGs from Still Frames
Animated PNG, or APNG, is a moving image with the quality of PNG: sharp lines, full colour, and real transparency. Unlike GIF, it is not limited to 256 colours, so gradients stay smooth and photos stay clean. This tool combines your still frames into a genuine APNG file, entirely in your browser. Your images never leave your device. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or seen by anyone else.
APNG files play in all modern browsers, which makes them a practical choice for the web. A designer can export a short animation from a drawing app as separate frames, then assemble them here. A teacher can turn a sequence of diagrams into a looping explanation. A shop owner can animate a product badge without touching video software.
How APNG Works
An APNG is a normal PNG with extra chunks of data. The first frame is an ordinary PNG image, so even a viewer that does not understand animation still shows something sensible. The animation chunks then describe the remaining frames, each with its own delay. That fallback is a quiet advantage: the file degrades gracefully instead of breaking.
Frame delay is measured in milliseconds in this tool. Five hundred milliseconds per frame gives a calm two-frames-per-second pace, good for slideshows and step-by-step diagrams. One hundred milliseconds gives ten frames per second, which reads as smooth motion for simple animations. Shorter delays look smoother but make the file play faster, so match the delay to the number of frames you have.
Using the Tool
Choose several images at once. The tool lists every frame with its size. All frames are drawn at the size of the first frame, so make your frames the same size before you start, or the later ones will be scaled to fit. Set the delay, press make, and a preview appears. Download the file with an .apng extension, or simply .png: both work, since APNG is PNG with animation data inside.
Frame order follows the order you selected the files, which usually follows the file names. Name your frames in sequence before uploading, such as frame01, frame02, frame03, so the order is obvious. If the preview plays out of order, rename and re-select rather than guessing which file the browser picked first.
Planning a Good Animation
Short loops work best. Two to twelve frames make animations that load fast and loop cleanly. Longer sequences are possible, but the file grows with every frame, and a fifty-frame animation from full-size photos can become several megabytes. For web use, keep frames small: a badge at 400 pixels wide animates far more efficiently than a full-screen photo sequence.
Think about the loop point. An animation that ends where it began loops invisibly, which looks professional. A bouncing ball that returns to its start, a blinking icon, or a rotating badge all loop cleanly. If your last frame jumps back to the first with a visible snap, add one or two in-between frames to smooth the return.
APNG Versus GIF
GIF is older and more widely supported in old software, but it caps colours at 256 and handles transparency as all-or-nothing per pixel. APNG keeps full colour and smooth partial transparency, so edges against any background look clean. For modern web pages, APNG is usually the better file. For maximum compatibility with ancient tools, GIF still has a place, and a sprite animator elsewhere on this site covers that case.
File size is the trade-off. APNG frames are compressed like PNG, which is efficient for graphics and diagrams but less so for photographic motion. A short graphic animation will be small. A long photographic animation may be larger than the same thing as video, and video is the better format there. Use APNG for short, graphic, looping animations, and it excels.
The tool is free, needs no account, and runs on any device with a browser. Upload your frames, set the delay, preview the animation, and download a real APNG file. Your images stay on your device from start to finish.
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