Convert AVIF to PNG

How to convert AVIF to PNG

1. Choose one or more AVIF images — drag them in or use the file picker.
2. Download the PNG — a single file, or a zip if you converted several at once.

A 200 KB AVIF becomes a PNG of four or five megabytes showing the same picture

A full-width web photograph saved as AVIF is often a couple of hundred kilobytes, because AV1’s intra coding spends well under a bit on each pixel. PNG cannot follow it there: it stores the fully decoded grid and then compresses that grid without discarding anything, and on continuous-tone photography that settles at only a few bits per pixel. A retina-scale frame of ten megapixels therefore lands at four to five megabytes of PNG — roughly twenty times the AVIF — for the identical picture.

AVIF is the still-image use of AV1, a video codec, and it brings a keyframe encoder’s toolkit — directional intra prediction, large variable-size transforms, adaptive arithmetic coding — to one picture, modelling what a viewer will not notice and spending nothing on it. That routinely holds a web photograph under half a bit per pixel, a density JPEG rarely reaches and WebP only approaches. PNG sits at the opposite end: lossless by definition, it keeps every pixel, and photographic grain leaves its compressor almost no redundancy to remove. The gap between a fraction of a bit and several bits is the whole twenty-fold jump.

None of that size can be tuned down on this page, because PNG output offers no quality setting — a lossless format has nothing to trade. What fixes the figure is how many pixels the source holds, and an AVIF disguises that number well — a hundred-kilobyte file can unpack to a twenty-four-megapixel frame. The converter writes the PNG at the source’s own dimensions, so a phone screenshot’s worth of pixels stays small, while a camera original still carrying sensor grain becomes one of tens of megabytes.

The oversized PNG is each format succeeding, not the converter going wrong

The size looks like a fault and is not one. AVIF and PNG were built to opposite ends: AV1’s encoder discards everything a viewer will not miss to make the file as small as perception allows, while PNG discards nothing so that every pixel returns byte for byte. Feed the output of the first into the second and it has to inflate — the small number and the large one are one picture measured by two formats that disagree about what is worth keeping. Nothing was decoded wrong, and the PNG carries no padding.

PNG earns that size only when losslessness is the real requirement — a picture that must arrive with every pixel exact, not merely looking right. When a small file is the goal instead, PNG is the wrong exit: the separate AVIF to JPG converter at /image-converter/avif-to-jpg/ re-encodes the same frame as a much smaller lossy file. Even that, at its default quality, usually settles above the original AVIF — a measure of how little the AV1 encoder had left on the table.

So the oversized file is the promise being kept, not broken. PNG guarantees that whatever goes in comes out identical, and it honours that on an AVIF photograph as exactly as on anything else — it simply cannot honour it cheaply, because the source arrived already compressed about as far as a picture goes. The four or five megabytes are the honest price of losing nothing, charged against a file that a lossy codec had spent all its cleverness making small.

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