Convert PNG to AVIF
If your PNG holds a photograph, this is the largest reduction anything on this site can give you: the most wasteful common way to store a picture, converted into the most efficient one there is. It is also the slowest conversion here, seconds per image rather than fractions of one, and it is worth knowing what you are waiting for before you start a batch of two hundred.
Nothing is uploaded. Every image stays in this browser tab —here is how that works.
What you are actually waiting for
Encoding an AVIF is a search. The encoder tries a great many different ways of predicting each block of the image from the blocks around it, keeps whichever came out cheapest, and repeats that across the whole picture. That search is why it takes seconds where a JPEG takes milliseconds, and it is why the time scales with the number of pixels rather than with the size of the file you started from: a 24-megapixel PNG and a 24-megapixel JPEG are the same amount of work.
Which gives you the lever. Capping the max width before you convert is the fastest way to make a batch finish sooner, because halving the width quarters the pixel count and the encoding time with it. Beyond that, several images run in parallel across your CPU cores, and the tab has to stay open while they do — the work is happening inside it, not somewhere else on your behalf.
The asymmetry is worth stating plainly, because it is the reason any of this is a good trade: decoding does none of that searching. A browser draws an AVIF about as quickly as it draws anything else. You wait once, at your desk; every visitor afterwards collects the saving.
The failure mode is softness, not blocks
AVIF descends from a video codec, and it fails the way video does. Push the quality down and a JPEG turns visibly blocky, which is ugly and obvious. An AVIF instead goes quietly smooth: film grain disappears, skin texture flattens, foliage and fabric turn into approximations of themselves. The picture looks slightly plastic long before it looks broken.
That is genuinely harder to notice, and therefore easier to ship by accident. Compare at full size rather than in the thumbnail, and pay attention to whichever part of the image has the finest texture in it. On a photograph where the texture is the subject — a knit, a landscape, anything shot on film — hold the quality higher than you would for a JPEG.
Where an AVIF can actually go
Browsers are fine. Chrome has read them since 2020, Firefox since 2021, and Safari since 16.4 in early 2023 — so the realistic gap is somebody on an iPhone that has not been updated in three years, which is a decision about your audience rather than about the format.
Everything else is patchier, and the thing to remember is that an upload form is not a browser. Plenty of them filter on the extension and will not accept an .avif whatever the file contains. Neither will most email clients, most photo printers, or a good number of desktop editors. Convert to AVIF for images you control the delivery of, and send a JPG to anyone who is going to download the file and open it themselves.
What changes when you convert PNG to AVIF
This is the first lossy step for these pixels — Trade-off
The encoder discards detail it judges you will not miss, and the quality slider decides how much. That trade is what buys the size reduction, and it is irreversible — converting back later restores the format, never the detail. Start at the default and lower it only until you can see the difference, then go one step back.
AVIF is the smallest output here, and the slowest to make — Benefit
AVIF typically lands 30–50% below WebP at matched quality, which is the largest saving this tool can offer. The cost is encoding time — it runs a video codec over your image and a large photo can take several seconds — and support that is universal in browsers but patchy in desktop applications.
Your PNG is pixel-exact, so this is the first loss it has seen — Note
PNG stores every pixel exactly as it was written, which means the file you are starting from is the best version that has ever existed. Anything lossy you convert it to is a one-way step — keep the PNG if it is a master copy and treat the output as a distribution format.
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
Is AVIF better than WebP?
Smaller at the same visual quality, by a margin worth having on a photograph and close to irrelevant on a small graphic. It is also slower to produce. If you are converting a handful of hero images, use AVIF; if you are converting four hundred product thumbnails against a deadline, WebP will be finished a great deal sooner.
Does AVIF support transparency?
Fully, including soft edges, and it compresses the alpha channel efficiently. A cut-out PNG with a drop shadow behind it is one of the cases where the size difference is most dramatic, and nothing has to be enabled for the transparency to survive the conversion.
Can I open an AVIF on my computer?
In a browser, certainly — drag the file into a tab. Outside one it varies: current Windows and macOS preview them, and a fair number of image editors still do not. If the file is going to a person rather than onto a web page, that is a good reason to send a JPG instead.
Why did my small icon come out bigger?
Below a few kilobytes the format’s own container overhead is a real share of the file, and there is very little left for a clever encoder to save. Small flat graphics are the one place AVIF has nothing to offer — keep the PNG, or use an SVG if the artwork was vector to begin with.
Related
Other things you can turn a PNG into
Try it with your own file
Drop an image in and see the result before you download anything.