PNG to AVIF Converter — Modern Image Compression

Browser canvas support, not format support

Most browsers can display AVIF images fine. Creating one on your machine is a different capability: it depends on whether your browser's canvas API can encode AVIF. If it cannot, you will see exactly this: This browser can't export AVIF. Try Chrome/Edge for AVIF, or pick a different target format. That message means the encoder is unavailable — AVIF encoding is done by the browser itself, not by a library this site ships, so there is nothing the page can do to work around it.

Keep the two capabilities apart in your head, because people conflate them constantly: viewing AVIF is now essentially universal; encoding it through the canvas API is not. If your browser refuses, switch to Chrome or Edge for this one conversion, or choose PNG to WebP instead, which every current browser can encode and which captures most of the same benefit.

AVIF is smaller, but encoding is expensive

For photographic content AVIF is dramatically smaller than PNG — PNG's lossless compression was never designed for photographs, so the gap is large rather than marginal. Against WebP the margin is real but much narrower. How much you actually gain depends entirely on the picture and your quality setting, so rather than trusting any published figure, convert a representative file and read the before and after sizes the tool reports for each image.

The trade-off is time. AVIF encoding is computationally expensive next to JPEG or WebP, so a large image takes visibly longer and a batch longer still. The page is doing real work during that pause — it is not hanging.

Lossy quality damages text and sharp edges

The quality slider (default 92, range 40–100) controls how much the AVIF encoder discards. For photographs, 90–95 looks visually lossless and 75–85 is the usual balance for the web. But PNG is very often the format holding screenshots, UI captures, logos and line art, and that content behaves differently: aggressive lossy settings smear crisp boundaries and put visible fuzz around small text. For anything with hard edges, raise the quality well above the default, compare at 100% zoom, and be willing to keep the PNG.

Transparency passes through, metadata does not

PNG transparency is preserved. AVIF has a full alpha channel, so soft shadows, feathered edges and partial transparency all survive the conversion, and no background colour is applied.

Metadata does not survive. The canvas re-encode strips EXIF, ICC colour profiles, GPS coordinates, camera settings and copyright fields. This is worth stating plainly: no format choice here avoids that — converting to JPEG or WebP instead strips metadata just the same, because the loss comes from the canvas pipeline rather than the target format. If you need that data, keep the original PNG alongside the converted file.