PalTool

PalTool is a command line utility for converting color palettes and reducing image file sizes, including animations. It sits at the intersection of pixel art tooling and image optimization, handling the kind of palette work that designers and developers often do by hand or with multiple separate tools. The project is open source under GPLv3+ and ships binaries for Linux and Windows, so you can run it without compiling anything or paying for anything. If you work with constrained color counts, whether for retro game development, pixel art, or web optimization, PalTool does the tedious conversion and quantization work for you.

The core problem it solves is palette management across formats. If you have ever needed to take a color palette from one application and use it in another, you know the friction involved. Different tools export different formats, and manually transcribing hex codes is error-prone and tedious. PalTool reads palettes in JASC-PAL, ASE, Paint.NET, GPL, HEX, GIF, PNG, and even Lospec format, then writes them out to whichever format you actually need. It also quantizes images to a specific number of colors, which is useful for retro game development, pixel art workflows, or simply shrinking file sizes without losing the visual identity of an image. The quantization process can include dithering to preserve detail when reducing color counts, and you can adjust significant bits per channel from one to eight for fine control over the output. This level of granularity is rare in free tools.

For animation work, PalTool converts between APNG, animated WebP, and GIF while preserving palette consistency across frames. That matters when you are targeting the web and need the smallest possible file without breaking the animation or introducing banding artifacts. Web developers spend real time chasing down the right format for a given browser matrix, and PalTool handles that conversion without requiring Photoshop or a suite of online converters. It can also flatten an animation down to a single frame if you only need a still image for a thumbnail or preview. The tool supports alpha channels throughout, so transparency is not quietly dropped during conversion the way it sometimes is with simpler tools. If you have ever lost transparency during a format conversion and had to redo the work, you will appreciate this.

On the input side, PalTool accepts PNG, WebP, GIF, JPG, BMP, PSD, TGA, HDR, PIC, PNM, QOI, and QOI2. Output options are PNG, WebP, GIF, or raw PAL files. That breadth means you can use it as a single stop for most palette and quantization tasks rather than chaining together multiple utilities, each with its own quirks and flags. It also supports palette ramp generation, which is handy when you need a smooth gradient or want to build a cohesive palette from scratch. Decolorization with palette mapping lets you take a color image and convert it to grayscale while still referencing a palette, and per-block color limiting gives you control over how colors are reduced within different regions of an image. These features add up to a tool that handles edge cases gracefully.

The audience is anyone working with constrained color counts. Pixel artists use it to enforce a specific palette across multiple assets, ensuring visual consistency in a sprite sheet or tileset. Game developers targeting low-spec or retro hardware use it to shrink sprites and tilesets while staying within memory budgets. Web developers use the animation conversion to pick the smallest format for a given target, saving bandwidth without sacrificing quality. Because it runs from the command line, it fits into build pipelines, batch scripts, and automated workflows without needing a graphical interface or manual intervention. You can drop it into a Makefile or CI job and forget about it.

PalTool stands out from general-purpose image editors because it treats palettes as first-class objects rather than afterthoughts buried in export dialogs. You can extract a palette from one image and apply it to another with a single command. You can generate a palette ramp from scratch or map an image's colors to a specific target palette. The focus is narrow but deep, covering a set of tasks that would otherwise require a patchwork of tools, browser-based converters, or manual labor in an image editor. It does one family of tasks well and stays out of the way for everything else.

Access is completely free and open source. You download a binary or build from source, and there is nothing to sign up for, no account to create, and no license to manage. The project is maintained on GitLab with documentation and example usage available in the repository. If you need palette conversion, image quantization, or animated format juggling in a scriptable, dependency-light package that runs locally on your machine, PalTool is purpose-built for exactly that. The community around it is small but active, and issues are tracked publicly so you can see what is being worked on.