How it works
From AVIF to PNG, in three steps
- 01
Choose an AVIF file
Drop a .avif photo in; most browsers decode it instantly, with an automatic fallback for the ones that can't.
- 02
Re-encode losslessly
Pixels are re-encoded as PNG, right in your browser, with no further loss from this point on.
- 03
Download PNG
Your .png downloads straight to your device. It never touched a server.
AVIF is built on AV1's still-image profile, which is a big part of why it compresses so well: dozens of directional prediction patterns, per-block, squeeze more visual quality into fewer bytes than older codecs manage. That efficiency comes at a cost though, since AVIF is still a lossy format, some detail is discarded the moment a photo is encoded that way, and no later conversion can bring it back.
This tool tries your browser's own built-in AVIF decoder first, and only falls back to a WebAssembly decoder (fetched just for that one file) if your browser can't read a particular AVIF on its own. Once decoded, the pixels are re-encoded as a standard PNG, which is lossless from that point forward. That's an important distinction: PNG guarantees nothing more is lost from here on, it does not undo whatever compression the original AVIF already applied.
When you need this
You need real transparency support
AVIF can carry an alpha channel, but plenty of tools that consume transparent images (older editors, certain print or web pipelines) expect PNG specifically and won't read AVIF's alpha correctly, or at all.
Locking in quality before further edits
If a photo is headed into several more rounds of editing or re-saving, converting to PNG now means every step after this one is lossless. It can't recover detail already lost to AVIF's own compression, but it stops any more from happening.
An upload form or asset library that only takes PNG
Some platforms and design systems specifically standardize on PNG, often for consistency with everything else already in the library, and simply don't have AVIF in their accepted-formats list.
Archiving alongside other lossless files
If the rest of a folder or asset set is already PNG, converting a stray AVIF file to match keeps the collection consistent, even though the AVIF file's own quality ceiling was fixed the moment it was first encoded.
Worked example
Say a design tool exported a graphic as artwork.avif, and the CMS you're uploading it into only lists PNG and JPG as accepted image types, but you specifically need the transparency this graphic has to survive the upload.
Drop the file into the box above and click "Convert." There's no quality slider on this page, since PNG has no lossy setting to tune. In about a second, entirely on your device, you'll have artwork.png with every pixel from the decoded AVIF preserved exactly, transparency included, a 180 KB AVIF like this one commonly lands somewhere around 700 KB to 1 MB as a PNG.
It's normal for the PNG to come out considerably larger, often several times the AVIF's size. AVIF's AV1-based compression is already unusually efficient for photographic content, so there's a lot more "efficiency" to lose by switching to a lossless format than there was going from, say, a plain JPEG. Bigger file, guaranteed no further loss: that's the trade this page exists to make.
Format explainer
AVIF gets its compression efficiency from AV1's intra-frame prediction: each block of pixels is predicted from its neighbors using dozens of directional patterns before whatever's left gets compressed further, and it supports 10-bit and 12-bit color depth plus a real alpha channel that plain JPEG never had. All of that is still fundamentally lossy though; encoding a photo as AVIF, however efficiently, means some information is discarded and never comes back.
PNG works on an entirely different principle: DEFLATE, the same lossless compression behind ZIP files, which can shrink data without ever discarding a single bit of it. That guarantee is exactly why PNG can't match AVIF's file sizes on photographic content, lossless compression simply can't exploit the same shortcuts a lossy codec can. Converting AVIF to PNG, as this tool does, decodes whatever survived AVIF's original compression and locks it in permanently, with nothing further lost from that point on.
Frequently asked questions
No. AVIF is a lossy format, so encoding a photo that way throws away some detail the moment it happens, and nothing that comes after can restore it. What PNG guarantees is that from this conversion onward, no further detail is lost, not that the file returns to some original, uncompressed state.
Because AVIF is unusually good at compressing photos, better than most lossy formats, and PNG can't use any of those same tricks since it has to preserve every pixel exactly. The gap tends to be larger here than converting from, say, JPEG to PNG, precisely because AVIF started off smaller to begin with.
No. It first tries whatever AVIF support your browser already has built in (most current browsers include it), and only loads a small WebAssembly decoder, automatically and just for that one file, if your specific browser can't handle it. There's nothing to install either way.
This tool only handles single still images. It checks for that specifically, and if your file turns out to be an animated AVIF sequence, it stops and tells you plainly rather than converting just the first frame and quietly calling that a finished result.
PNG doesn't have one to offer: it's lossless by definition, so there's no quality-versus-size tradeoff to expose. If you're specifically after a smaller file and don't need a lossless result, the JPG version of this tool does include that control.
Yes, drop as many as you want into the tool at once. Each converts on its own and shows its own progress, and once they're all finished you can grab everything together as a single .zip instead of downloading one at a time.
No part of it does. Both the AVIF decode and the PNG encode run entirely on your device, in a background thread so the page keeps responding while it works. Open your browser's DevTools and watch the Network tab during a conversion if you'd like to see that for yourself.