.apng

What is a .apng file?

APNG is an animated PNG — better colour depth and transparency than GIF, with fallback to a static first frame in unsupported viewers.

Safe format
Type Image
By Mozilla
MIME image/apng

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What is it

You saved an animated image and it's an .apng file — Animated PNG. Think of it as GIF's technically superior replacement: full 24-bit colour instead of 256, proper alpha transparency, and smaller file sizes for equivalent animation quality. The catch is that almost nobody uses it.

APNG was created by Mozilla developers in 2004 and rejected by the PNG working group, which considered it outside PNG's scope. Despite this, browser vendors implemented it anyway — every modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) supports APNG natively. The format is backwards-compatible: if an application doesn't support APNG, it displays the first frame as a static PNG. This graceful fallback was a clever design choice that GIF's successors (WebP animation, AVIF animation) don't share.

Every modern browser displays APNG. Apple Preview and iOS handle them natively. For creating APNG files, APNG Assembler (free, command-line) combines PNG frames. EZGIF.com converts GIF to APNG in the browser. For web use, APNG is genuinely better than GIF — but WebP animation has broader tooling support and similar quality advantages.

Technical details
Full Name
Animated PNG
MIME Type
image/apng
Developer
Mozilla
Magic Bytes
89 50 4E 47
Safety
.apng is a known, safe format.
What opens it
Any modern browser
FREE All
Apple Preview
FREE macOS
FAQ
Is APNG better than GIF?
Technically, yes — 24-bit colour versus 256, real transparency, smaller files. But GIF has universal support and cultural momentum. APNG is supported by all modern browsers but has fewer creation tools. For quality-conscious web animations, APNG is the better format.
What happens if a viewer doesn't support APNG?
It shows the first frame as a static PNG. This built-in fallback means APNG files are safe to use anywhere PNGs work — unsupported viewers just won't see the animation.
Related formats