You attach a PNG file, hit send, and the reply comes back: "can you resend this as AVIF?" It happens with print shops, CMS uploads and government portals alike. Here is the clean way to convert, what it does to your file, and the numbers to expect.
PNG vs AVIF at a glance
| Format | Compression | Transparency | Animation | Support (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PNG | Lossless | Yes | No | every browser since the early 2000s |
| AVIF | Lossy and lossless | Yes | Yes | over 93% of browsers in 2026, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge |
Read the support column first; in most conversions that row alone is the entire motivation.
The real reasons people convert PNG to AVIF
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless format made for logos, transparency, screenshots, web graphics. Its weak spots — larger file sizes for photos, no animation support — are exactly where AVIF steps in.
AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) handles next-generation web images, high-quality compression, and in 2026 its support looks like this: over 93% of browsers in 2026, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge. On size, the practical picture: roughly half the size of a comparable JPEG, and about 20% under WebP.
In practice the push comes from three places: platform requirements, collaboration with people on other tools, and plain file-size pressure.
Converting PNG to AVIF in the browser
Open the AVIF converter and drop your PNG file onto the upload area. Multi-select works, so a whole folder of files goes in at once — useful when a shoot or an export produced dozens of them.
Start the conversion and watch the size readout: the page shows the output weight before you commit to downloading. That single number answers most of the questions people bring to guides like this one.
Single files download directly; batches come back as one ZIP, which keeps a 50-file job tidy instead of raining downloads on your browser.
If a file fails — it happens with corrupted exports — re-saving it once from any viewer and retrying usually clears it. Genuinely broken files fail everywhere, including in Photoshop.
Before you convert: a 30-second checklist
Keep the original. Conversions into lossy formats are one-way; the PNG you started from is your archive copy, so it never gets deleted or overwritten.
Check the destination's rules. If a platform or print shop asked for AVIF, it often also has size or resolution limits — knowing them now saves a second round trip.
Group the batch. Converting fifty files in one upload beats fifty single conversions, and the ZIP you get back keeps the set together with its filenames intact.
Quality: the honest version
PNG uses lossless compression; AVIF uses lossy and lossless. Re-saving a lossy file repeatedly is what visibly degrades images — a single conversion at good settings is not the problem.
For scale: a 1080p screenshot is typically 150-400 KB; a 12-megapixel photo can exceed 15 MB. After conversion to AVIF, expect the relationship to shift — roughly half the size of a comparable JPEG, and about 20% under WebP.
Tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh compress harder but work one file at a time; for batch jobs a converter with a ZIP download wins on time.
Check the result at 100% zoom, not fitted-to-window: scaling hides exactly the artifacts you are checking for.
When fifty files become five hundred
Past a certain volume the bottleneck moves from conversion speed to organization. Name files before converting, not after — the converter preserves names, so a clean naming scheme going in is a clean archive coming out.
Recurring jobs deserve a recurring habit: same folder structure, same batch size, same checks. Boring beats clever at five hundred files.
A worked example, with numbers
Take a typical case: a 1080p screenshot is typically 150-400 KB; a 12-megapixel photo can exceed 15 MB. Convert that to AVIF and the format's profile takes over: roughly half the size of a comparable JPEG, and about 20% under WebP. The percentages vary with image content — flat-color graphics and detailed photos compress very differently — so trust the size readout on your own files over any blog's average.
When something looks wrong
Colors shifted. Wide-gamut originals viewed in sRGB-only software look washed out. The fix is converting from an sRGB copy for web use — not a higher quality setting.
The file will not open. Nine times out of ten the viewer is the limitation, not the file. Try a second viewer before blaming the conversion, or convert to AVIF — if that copy opens, the original was fine all along.
Transparent areas turned white. The target format has no alpha channel; flattening is the documented behaviour, not a bug. Re-convert to PNG or WebP if transparency must survive.
The file got bigger. Some content genuinely compresses worse in the new format — flat graphics in photo-oriented codecs, photos in graphics-oriented ones. The size readout before download is the early warning.
Where AVIF files behave oddly
Messaging apps and social platforms recompress whatever you send — WhatsApp and most social feeds will re-encode your carefully converted AVIF anyway, so don't chase perfection for those destinations. Email clients are stricter: attachments survive untouched, which makes format choice matter more there.
CMS uploaders are the third trap: many enforce size limits or a format whitelist. If an upload bounces, the platform's allowed-formats list — not your file — is usually the explanation.
What this means for page speed
Images are usually the heaviest asset class on a page, so format choice flows straight into Largest Contentful Paint — the Core Web Vitals metric Google weighs for ranking. Lighter images, earlier paint, better scores: the chain is that direct.
Pair the format change with loading="lazy" on below-the-fold images and correct display dimensions, and the speed gain typically doubles.
Measure before and after with PageSpeed Insights — the image-weight line item makes the improvement concrete instead of theoretical.
What happens to EXIF and metadata
Every photo from a camera or phone carries hidden baggage: capture date, device model, exposure settings and — on phones — often GPS coordinates. Conversion is one of the moments where that baggage can be kept or dropped.
For files headed to the public web, dropped metadata is a privacy feature: nobody needs your home coordinates embedded in a product photo.
The practical rule: treat the original as the metadata archive and the converted copy as the public version. That division of labour answers most privacy and copyright questions before they come up.
Thirty seconds of compression theory
Lossless compression is bookkeeping, not deletion: repeated patterns get written once with a count, and decompression rebuilds every original pixel exactly. The price is that random, noisy content — photographs — barely shrinks.
Dual-mode formats carry both toolboxes: a lossy mode for photographs and a lossless one for graphics. That flexibility is exactly why the modern web formats displaced single-mode ancestors.
Once you see the mechanism, every size difference in this article stops being magic and starts being arithmetic.
After the conversion
Once your files are AVIF, they slot into workflows PNG could not reach: next-generation web images, high-quality compression. If you handle this pair often, the our AVIF format guide covers the deeper trade-offs.
Three pitfalls to skip
Don't upscale before converting — extra pixels invent nothing and inflate the file. Don't convert a screenshot with text into a heavily lossy format if crisp edges matter. And keep the PNG originals archived; storage is cheaper than regret.
The pattern behind all three: conversion is cheap and reversible only when the original survives. Protect the source and every mistake becomes a do-over.
Common Questions
Does converting PNG to AVIF reduce quality?
Only if AVIF is lossy, and even then a single conversion at default settings is rarely visible. The damage people associate with conversion comes from re-saving lossy files over and over, not from one clean pass. Keep the original PNG and you can always go back.
Can I convert several PNG files at once?
Yes — drop the whole selection into the AVIF converter and you get the results back as one ZIP. Batch jobs of 30-50 files are routine; the per-file time stays in the seconds.
What happens to transparency when I convert?
Transparency survives when both formats support an alpha channel; here the relevant fact is that AVIF does support it, so nothing is lost.
Is it safe to upload my images?
Transfers run over HTTPS and files are removed from the server after processing. For genuinely sensitive material, the cautious move with any online tool is the same: convert locally instead.
Can I convert the AVIF back to PNG later?
Yes, the reverse converter exists — but a round trip through a lossy format does not restore discarded data. Treat the original PNG as the master copy and convert from it each time, rather than chaining conversions.
Does converting change the image dimensions?
No. Width and height in pixels stay exactly the same; only the encoding changes. If you also need resizing, do it as a separate, deliberate step — and always downscale, never upscale.
If this pair comes up often in your work, bookmark the AVIF converter — the second conversion takes ten seconds, because you'll skip the reading.
Written by Giovanni Picaro, a web developer who has been building image tools and optimizing sites since 2019. Sources: MDN image format reference and Google web.dev. Last reviewed: 2026.