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PNG to AVIF converter

Convert PNG images to AVIF format

No watermarkFree & unlimited
All processing happens in your browser. No data is sent to any server.

AVIF wraps a single AV1 video keyframe in a HEIF container, and that borrowed video machinery is why it beats every other still format on bytes per pixel. For a PNG source the appeal is obvious: the alpha channel carries over, the colour fidelity at sensible quality settings is high, and the result is often a tenth of the original. The cost is encoder availability and time. AV1 intra coding is heavy, so a large image takes seconds rather than milliseconds, and only Chromium-based browsers can perform this encode at all.

Key facts about PNG to AVIF converter

Key facts about PNG to AVIF converter
CodecAV1 intra-frame coding in a HEIF wrapper, invoked through the canvas with the image/avif type.
Browser requirementChrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium builds can encode. Firefox and Safari display AVIF but cannot write it, and the canvas spec makes them hand back PNG bytes under the .avif name instead.
Alpha channelSupported and preserved, so cut-outs and soft shadows come across from the PNG intact.
Quality sliderActive for this target; 90 is the default and maps to the encoder's quality argument. Even 70 is usually clean on photographic content.
SpeedThe slowest conversion in the image set. A 12-megapixel source can take several seconds per file, and a batch of twenty is a coffee break.
Typical size deltaAn 8 MB photographic PNG frequently lands between 400 and 800 KB at quality 90 - roughly half what the same picture costs as a JPG.
Decode supportChrome 85 and later, Firefox 93, Safari 16.4, macOS Ventura Preview, and Windows 11 once the AV1 extension is installed.
MetadataThe canvas route passes pixels only, so nothing from the PNG's chunks is carried into the AVIF item.
AnimationAVIF supports image sequences, but this converter writes a single still frame and nothing else.

What happens to your file

The AV1 encoder doing the work is the one already compiled into your browser, reached by calling canvas.toBlob with image/avif after your PNG has been decoded and drawn. No WebAssembly codec is fetched, no worker pool is spun up on a server, and the image bytes never form part of a request. The reason a conversion pins a CPU core for a few seconds is precisely that your own machine is doing the encoding - that work would otherwise be someone else's server bill.

About this tool

  1. 1

    Open this page in a Chromium browser

    Chrome or Edge will encode real AVIF. In Firefox or Safari the canvas falls back to PNG data, which is the one failure mode worth knowing about.

  2. 2

    Add your PNG files

    Photographic and illustrative sources benefit most; a two-colour icon is already tiny as a PNG.

  3. 3

    Set the quality

    Start at the default 90 and compare. AVIF holds up far lower than JPG does, so 70-80 is a reasonable target for hero images.

  4. 4

    Convert and wait

    Progress moves more slowly than on other targets. When it finishes, check the reported size reduction before downloading.

Specs & compatibility
Input and outputTakes .png only (image/png) and returns .avif with the image/avif type; any other extension is refused before decoding.
Conversion pathPNG to AVIF runs in three steps: an <img> element hands the file to the browser's own PNG decoder; the pixels land on a 2D canvas in this tab; then canvas.toBlob with the image/avif type returns the finished file.
Browser supportThe PNG side decodes in every browser ever shipped, while writing the AVIF needs a Chromium browser, since Firefox and Safari return PNG bytes under the .avif name.
Controls for this pairA 30 to 100 quality slider (steps of five, default 90) drives the AVIF encode, max-dimension presets from 3840 down to 200 px resize the PNG first, and the strip-metadata toggle is moot on this pair.
Batch, caps and namingTwenty PNG files per run at 500 MB each; one result downloads as a single AVIF, several as converted-avif-files.zip, zipped by JSZip 3.10 in page memory.
Device ceilingThe canvas caps it: past roughly 16,384 px a side Chromium refuses the bitmap and iPhone Safari gives up sooner, so an oversized PNG fails before any AVIF bytes exist.
  • Serve AVIF from a picture element with a WebP or JPG fallback source - a small share of visitors still cannot decode it.
  • Because the encode is slow, downscale first: encoding a 4K image you will display at 1200 px wastes most of the time spent.
  • If the output file is suspiciously large and opens as a normal image everywhere, you are probably on a browser that wrote PNG bytes instead.
  • Flat vector-style artwork can compress better as lossless WebP than as AVIF, so it is worth comparing both on the same source.
  • Cutting the weight of photographic hero images on a site that already serves modern formats.
  • Archiving a large photo library at a visually lossless setting for a fraction of the PNG storage.
  • Preparing image assets for an app or a site where bandwidth per visitor is the metric that matters.
AV1 intra coding searches far more prediction modes and block partitions than JPEG or WebP do, and that search is what buys the compression. On a 12-megapixel image the encoder can run for several seconds in a single tab. It is genuine CPU work on your machine, not a queue or a rate limit.
Yes. AVIF stores alpha as a separate auxiliary plane, so transparent regions, anti-aliased edges and soft shadows survive the conversion. Together with WebP it is one of the two targets here that does not force you to flatten a cut-out image onto a background.
Decoding is broadly available - Chrome since version 85, Firefox since 93 and Safari since 16.4 - so most visitors will see the image. Encoding is the narrow part, and this page needs a Chromium browser for it. Older systems and some desktop applications still have no AVIF support at all.
For photographs the difference is dramatic: an 8 MB PNG commonly becomes well under a megabyte at quality 90, because PNG has to store camera noise exactly while AVIF models it. For flat illustrations with few colours the gap narrows, and a well-optimised PNG can occasionally be competitive.
On compression, usually yes - AVIF tends to produce a smaller file at matching visual quality, especially on photographs. WebP wins on encode speed, on encoder availability across browsers, and on support in older desktop software. For screenshots and line art, lossless WebP is often the more practical choice.

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