Convert AVIF to PNG
There are two reasons to want a PNG out of an AVIF. One is that something in your workflow only accepts PNG, which is a perfectly good reason. The other is a hunch that lossless means better quality — and that one does not hold, because the AVIF was almost certainly written in its lossy mode, so the PNG copies that approximation faithfully and charges you ten or twenty times the bytes for it.
Nothing is uploaded. Every image stays in this browser tab —here is how that works.
Choose PNG for the alpha channel, not for the quality
An AVIF can carry full transparency, and PNG is the universally understood format that keeps it. If the image is a logo, a UI asset, a cut-out or anything with a soft edge that has to sit on a background you do not control, that is the whole case for choosing this conversion over JPG — and it is a good one.
What PNG will not do is improve the picture. Practically every AVIF in the wild — every one served by a website, every one out of an export preset — was encoded in the lossy mode, because that is the mode AVIF exists for. The pixels you are about to copy exactly are already the encoder’s best guess at the original. Making a perfect copy of a good approximation is a reasonable thing to do when you need the format; it is a poor way to spend eight megabytes when what you actually wanted was the picture to look better.
How big is “many times larger”?
It depends almost entirely on what is in the image, and the spread is enormous.
A PNG’s worst case is roughly four bytes per pixel, which is simply what the image occupies once decoded, before compression does anything. A 3,000 × 2,000 photograph is therefore about 24 MB of raw pixels, and lossless compression usually brings a photograph down to somewhere between a third and two-thirds of that — sensor noise and fine texture are close to random, and random data does not compress. A 400 kB AVIF becoming an 8 MB PNG is an entirely ordinary outcome.
Flat artwork behaves nothing like that. A logo, a chart, a screenshot of an interface — long runs of identical pixels and a handful of distinct colours — compresses beautifully, and the PNG can land far smaller than you would fear. Occasionally it lands smaller than the AVIF, because AVIF is tuned for photographs and spends its cleverness on things a diagram does not contain.
If there is a hard cap at the other end, set a max file size and you will get the largest version that fits under it.
When JPG is the better target
If the image is a photograph with nothing transparent in it — which covers most AVIFs anyone ever downloads — JPG at quality 90 gives you a file a fraction of the size that nobody will distinguish from the PNG. Reach for PNG when the format is the requirement, when there is an alpha channel to protect, or when the file will be opened, edited and saved several times over.
As a default for photographs it is an expensive way of saying “I would like the good version”, and it does not deliver one.
What changes when you convert AVIF to PNG
Only the first frame is kept — Trade-off
The source can hold an animation and the output is a single still, so the first frame is converted and the rest are dropped. There is no warning at the point of use — the file simply stops moving — so if the motion mattered, a short muted MP4 or WebM is the format you are looking for, at a fraction of the size an animated GIF would be.
HDR is flattened to standard range — Trade-off
The source can describe highlights brighter than a normal screen shows; the target cannot. The image is tone-mapped down to standard dynamic range, which usually reads as slightly duller highlights and a flatter sky. Nothing is broken — it is the same picture, rendered for an ordinary display.
Wide-gamut colour is converted to sRGB — Trade-off
Phone cameras and scanners record colours outside what sRGB can express — the saturated reds and greens in particular. Those are converted rather than clipped, so the picture stays true, but the most intense colours land slightly inside where they were. The conversion is done properly and once; the alternative, leaving the numbers alone and dropping the profile, is what makes images look washed out.
12 bits per channel become 8 — Trade-off
The source stores finer gradations per colour channel than the output can hold. In practice this shows up in smooth gradients — a clear sky, a studio backdrop — where the extra precision was hiding the steps between shades. At 8 bits those steps can become faintly visible bands.
PNG is lossless from here on — Benefit
Whatever the image looks like going in is exactly what comes out, pixel for pixel, and it will stay that way through any number of further PNG saves. That makes it the right target for a master copy, a screenshot, or anything with text and hard edges — and the wrong one for a photograph you want to be small.
AVIF is already about as small as this image gets — Note
AVIF is the most efficient encoder in this tool, so an AVIF file is usually already near the floor for its quality. Converting it to anything older will normally produce a larger file — which is fine when the reason is that something you use cannot open AVIF, and pointless when it is not.
The quality slider does nothing here — size comes from dimensions — Note
A lossless target has no quality dial to turn, so the slider is disabled and the only lever that moves the file size is how many pixels there are. Halving the width and height quarters the pixel count, which is almost always a bigger saving than any encoder setting would have been. Set a max width you actually need rather than shipping the original dimensions.
Camera and location metadata are not carried over — Note
EXIF is dropped: the camera model, the exposure settings, the timestamp, and — the one that matters — the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. That is a privacy improvement for anything you are about to publish and a loss if you were relying on it for cataloguing. Orientation is the exception: it is applied to the pixels, so the image stays the right way up.
Output is sRGB — Note
Everything this tool writes is in sRGB, the colour space the web assumes. That is what makes the result look the same in a browser, a chat app and a photo viewer without an embedded profile to carry around.
Questions people ask about this conversion
Does an AVIF’s transparency survive the conversion to PNG?
Yes, at full precision. Both formats store an 8-bit alpha channel per pixel, so soft edges, feathered masks and drop shadows come across intact rather than being flattened onto a background colour.
Why is my PNG twenty times the size of the AVIF?
Because the two formats are solving opposite problems. AVIF spends a decade of compression research on making the file small, and is allowed to approximate to get there. PNG may not discard anything at all, and photographic detail is close to random data, which is the worst case for any lossless compressor.
Should I convert my AVIF to PNG or to JPG?
PNG if there is transparency in it, if something downstream demands PNG by name, or if the file is about to be edited and saved repeatedly. JPG for everything else, especially photographs — it will be a fraction of the size and nobody will see the difference at quality 90.
Is there a limit on how large a file I can convert?
No fixed one, because there is no server to impose a quota. The practical limit is your device’s memory: an image takes about four bytes per pixel once decoded and several are processed at once, so a batch of 50-megapixel files will strain a phone where a laptop shrugs. Anything over 50 MB gets a warning before it starts.
Related
Other things you can turn a AVIF into
Try it with your own file
Drop an image in and see the result before you download anything.