The lossless way out of a modern format
AVIF is superb for delivering images and poor for handing them to other software. Many editors, office suites, older operating systems and upload forms still do not recognise it. PNG is the opposite: universal, lossless, and transparent where it needs to be. Converting AVIF to PNG is the right move when the image is a graphic, a logo, a cut-out or a screenshot, when it has a transparent background, or when you plan to edit it and do not want a lossy format in the middle of your workflow.
The tool has no quality slider, because a PNG encode has nothing to trade. The AVIF is decoded by your browser, the raw pixels go to a Web Worker, and a WebAssembly PNG encoder writes them out unchanged. No upload is involved.
Your browser is the decoder
This conversion only works in a browser that can display AVIF natively, because that is what does the decoding. Chrome and Edge have supported it since 2020, Firefox since version 93, Safari since 16.4 on macOS Ventura and iOS 16.4. On an older browser the file fails to open and the tool says so; nothing is silently guessed. If you are on an older Mac or iPhone and need this to work, updating the browser or the OS is the only fix.
What survives and what is flattened
- Transparency survives exactly. Soft, partially transparent edges from an AVIF cut-out come through as a proper 8-bit alpha channel in the PNG. This is the main reason to choose PNG over AVIF to JPG.
- Pixels are preserved as decoded. AVIF is lossy, so its smoothing and any faint blocking are already in the image; the PNG freezes them without adding anything.
- Depth and gamut are reduced. Many AVIF files are 10-bit, and some are HDR or Display P3. The canvas pipeline outputs 8-bit sRGB, so HDR highlights clip and the widest colours are brought in. For ordinary web images this is not visible; for an HDR photo it is a real loss and you should keep the AVIF as the master.
- Animation, metadata and profiles are dropped. An animated AVIF yields its first frame only. EXIF, XMP and the ICC profile are not written into the PNG.
Expect a large size jump
AVIF is one of the most compact formats in use, and PNG is one of the largest for anything photographic, so the numbers can be startling. Typical results:
- A 1200x1200 product cut-out of 60 KB as AVIF usually becomes a 1.2 to 2 MB PNG.
- A 1920x1080 photo of 95 KB as AVIF usually becomes 2.5 to 4 MB.
- A 800x800 flat logo of 12 KB as AVIF often lands at 40 to 120 KB, a modest jump because flat colour compresses well in PNG too.
The PNG encoder writes 32-bit RGBA and does not palette-reduce, so a specialised PNG optimiser could shrink flat graphics further. For photos, no optimiser will help much; PNG is simply the wrong format for them, and AVIF to WebP gives a compatible file at a fraction of the size when transparency or losslessness are not required.
When this is the wrong tool
Do not convert a whole photo library to PNG for storage; the files will be thirty times larger with no quality gain, since the loss already happened when the AVIF was made. Do not convert to PNG to put an image back on a website. And if you only need the file to open in a specific application, check first whether that application has gained AVIF support in a recent update, which many have. Very large AVIFs are bounded by canvas memory on your device, and each file in a batch is processed one after another with its own download button. The article WebP vs AVIF vs JPEG has more on which formats to keep and which to convert.