Convert AVIF to PNG — when you absolutely cannot lose a single pixel
AVIF can be lossy or lossless; PNG is always lossless. When your downstream tool — a print shop, a design handoff, a PowerPoint deck — cannot open AVIF and must receive every pixel intact, PNG is the safe bridge. The conversion runs entirely in your browser: no upload, no server, no waiting.
Convert to PNG →Why convert AVIF to PNG?
PNG has been the universal lossless raster format for three decades. Design tools, office suites, print workflows, chat apps, and operating-system preview panes all open PNG without complaint. AVIF is the modern successor with far better compression, but its decoder is missing from a long tail of software — Adobe InDesign older than 2024, most word processors, print-order kiosks, and Windows thumbnail generation before 2021. Converting AVIF to PNG makes the file readable everywhere while keeping the pixel data bit-for-bit intact. If your AVIF was itself lossless, you end up with a PNG that is a perfect copy of the original sensor data.
What you lose and what you gain
Going AVIF → PNG is a lossless decode followed by a lossless encode, so you lose zero image information — every RGB value and every alpha value survives unchanged. What you do give up is file size: a typical 4032×3024 phone photo that sat at 600 KB as a lossy AVIF balloons to 8–12 MB as a PNG because PNG stores uncompressed pixel runs rather than a compact frequency-domain representation. If your AVIF was already lossless (uncommon but possible), the PNG will be smaller than you might expect — around 3–4 MB — because there is no re-compression penalty. What you gain is a file that opens in literally everything, with no re-encoding artefacts introduced, and with transparency preserved down to the last semi-transparent pixel.
How to convert AVIF to PNG
Every step runs locally in your browser. The WASM decoders are cached after the first page load, so the tool even works offline:
- Click "Convert to PNG →" at the top of this page or drag your AVIF onto the drop zone on the homepage. Any AVIF with or without an alpha channel is accepted — the tool detects transparency automatically.
- ConvertMyPic decodes the AVIF using libaom (the reference AV1/AVIF decoder from the Alliance for Open Media, compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten). A preview of the decoded image appears within one to two seconds for typical phone-photo files.
- The decoded bitmap — now a raw RGBA pixel buffer in browser memory — is passed to oxiPNG, the Rust-based PNG encoder compiled to WebAssembly. oxiPNG applies lossless DEFLATE compression at level 2 by default, balancing speed and size without discarding any pixel data.
- Click the download button. Your PNG saves to the Downloads folder with the same filename as the source, extension swapped — logo.avif becomes logo.png. Alpha channel rows are stored as RGBA PNG, opaque images as RGB PNG to keep file sizes reasonable.
- Need the smallest possible PNG? Open /convert and move the oxiPNG compression slider to level 6. Encoding takes longer but can reduce file size by an additional 10–15% through more exhaustive DEFLATE search — still fully lossless.
File size comparison: AVIF vs PNG
Measured on a 4032×3024 iPhone 15 Pro photo (coastal landscape, 12.2 MP, with a transparent sky layer composited for the alpha-channel rows). AVIF decoded with libaom; PNG encoded with oxiPNG level 2.
| Format | Quality | File size | Visual notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| AVIF (lossy, source) | q75 | 603 KB | Original, no visible artefacts |
| AVIF (lossless) | lossless | 3.5 MB | Bit-exact pixels, large file |
| PNG (opaque, level 2) | lossless | 8.3 MB | Identical pixels to AVIF lossless |
| PNG (RGBA, level 2) | lossless | 10.8 MB | Full alpha channel preserved |
| PNG (opaque, level 6) | lossless | 7.1 MB | 15% smaller, slower encode |
When to convert, and when to stay on AVIF
Convert to PNG when the destination cannot decode AVIF and you must not lose quality. Typical situations: handing a logo with transparency to a print bureau; attaching an image to an email that will be opened in Outlook 2016; embedding a sprite sheet in a Unity or Unreal project that predates AVIF support; posting a screenshot to a Jira or Confluence instance that strips unknown MIME types; sharing a transparent UI asset with a colleague on Windows 10 version 1809 or earlier (which shows AVIF as a blank white square in File Explorer). Stay on AVIF when you control the pipeline end-to-end: your own website served to modern browsers, a CDN that transcodes on delivery, Apple Photos, Lightroom, or any editing tool you have confirmed supports the format. The file-size gap is real — a 600 KB AVIF becoming a 10 MB PNG is not a rounding error. For pure web delivery where compatibility is not an issue, AVIF stays the better choice in 2026.
Under the hood: which codecs are used
ConvertMyPic is built on Google's Squoosh codec stack. AVIF decoding uses libaom — the Alliance for Open Media's reference implementation of the AV1 video codec, which also serves as the reference AVIF decoder (github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif). It is the same decoder that ships inside Chrome and Firefox, so the pixel output is authoritative. The decoded frame is a 32-bit RGBA buffer resident in WebAssembly linear memory. PNG encoding is handled by oxiPNG — a Rust rewrite of the OptiPNG optimizer that applies multi-pass DEFLATE to squeeze the output without altering any pixel values (github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng). Both libaom and oxiPNG run inside a Web Worker, keeping the browser UI responsive during encode. The only network traffic you will see in DevTools is the initial page load and a CDN cache of the two WASM bundles.
FAQ
Do my files get uploaded anywhere?
No. Decoding and encoding both run in your browser using WebAssembly. Open your browser's Network tab during a conversion — you will see zero outbound requests beyond the initial page load. There is no server to upload to.
What is the maximum file size I can convert?
Browser memory is the only limit. On a desktop with 16 GB of RAM, files above 50 MB and resolutions above 200 MP work reliably in Chrome. On older phones, stability is typical up to around 40 MP. If a file exceeds available memory you will see a descriptive error rather than a silent crash.
Is the PNG output truly lossless?
Yes, unconditionally. PNG is a lossless format by specification. oxiPNG only applies entropy coding optimizations (choosing better DEFLATE parameters) — it never discards pixel values. If your AVIF source was itself lossless, the resulting PNG is a bit-exact copy of the original pixels.
Will transparency be preserved?
Yes. Both AVIF and PNG carry per-pixel alpha channels. The libaom decoder outputs a full 32-bit RGBA buffer, and oxiPNG writes an RGBA PNG when the source has transparency. Each pixel's opacity is preserved to the last bit — you will see no fringing, no white halos, and no flattened background.
Why is the PNG so much bigger than the AVIF?
AVIF (like JPEG) uses perceptual compression that discards detail the human eye is less sensitive to, achieving 10:1 to 20:1 ratios over raw pixels. PNG uses DEFLATE, a lossless algorithm that can typically compress a photo by only 2:1 to 3:1. So a 600 KB lossy AVIF routinely becomes an 8–12 MB PNG. You are trading file size for universal compatibility and zero re-compression loss.
Why PNG instead of TIFF for lossless round-trips?
TIFF is also lossless and supports alpha, but it is not a web format — browsers do not render it inline, email clients strip it, and most online tools reject it. PNG achieves the same lossless + alpha combination in a format that every piece of software from 1996 onward can open. TIFF makes sense in professional print pre-press; PNG is the right choice for anything that must travel across tools and operating systems.
Does the PNG keep EXIF metadata from the AVIF?
PNG has limited native EXIF support. The converter writes a tEXt or eXIf chunk with the original metadata when it is present, but some viewers ignore those chunks. If you need lossless pixels and full EXIF fidelity, the advanced options on /convert include a toggle. For privacy-sensitive images — those with embedded GPS coordinates — use the EXIF-strip option before downloading.
Does this work offline?
After the page loads once, the service worker caches both the app and the WASM decoder bundles. Subsequent conversions work with WiFi disconnected. That's why the app is installable as a PWA on both desktop and mobile.
Is this tool free? Why?
There is no server involved in the conversion — all compute runs on your CPU. Hosting cost is a small CDN bill for serving static files. There is nothing substantial to charge for, so the tool is free.
Can I convert multiple AVIF files to PNG at once?
The current workflow is one file at a time. Batch conversion is on the roadmap. For larger sets today, open /convert in multiple browser tabs and process files in parallel — each tab operates independently and does not affect the others.