A lossless bridge into tools that lag behind the web
Browsers adopted AVIF quickly, but desktop software has been slower. Plenty of image editors, design tools, CMS uploaders and internal systems still refuse .avif files years after the web started serving them. Converting to PNG is the clean workaround: PNG has been universally supported since the 1990s, and because it is lossless, you hand your editor exactly the pixels the AVIF contained. There is no second round of compression artifacts to stack on top of your edits, which is why PNG, not JPG, is the right intermediate format for anything you plan to keep working on.
Transparency survives, file size grows
AVIF supports a full alpha channel, and so does PNG, so cutouts, logos and interface graphics keep their transparent backgrounds through this conversion, including smooth partial transparency at the edges. The trade-off is size: AVIF compresses aggressively and PNG does not discard anything, so files typically grow several times over. For graphics with flat colors the growth is modest; for photographs it can be dramatic.
Once your edits are done, you can shrink the result back down with PNG to WebP or PNG to JPG before publishing.
Common questions
Is AVIF to PNG completely lossless?+−
The PNG step is. Every pixel your browser decodes from the AVIF is written into the PNG exactly, with no further compression loss. Keep in mind that most AVIF files were lossy-compressed when they were created, so the PNG is a perfect copy of the image as it exists now, not a way to recover detail the AVIF already discarded.
Does PNG keep transparency from AVIF files?+−
Yes. AVIF supports a full alpha channel, and PNG preserves it completely, including soft partial transparency around edges. This matters for logos, cutouts and UI graphics saved from the web. If you converted to JPG instead, the transparent areas would be flattened onto a white background, so PNG is the right target whenever alpha matters.
Why is the PNG so much larger than the AVIF?+−
Expect a significant size increase. AVIF uses AV1-based compression, one of the most efficient codecs on the web, while PNG refuses to discard anything. A few hundred kilobytes of AVIF can easily become several megabytes of PNG. That is the normal cost of lossless storage; if file size matters more, JPG is the smaller compromise.
When should I choose PNG over JPG for an AVIF file?+−
Choose PNG when the image is going into an editor or design tool that does not accept AVIF yet, when it has transparency, or when you will re-save it repeatedly and want to avoid generation loss. For photos that are only going to be viewed or uploaded somewhere, JPG gives you a far smaller file that looks the same.