PNG to TGA Converter: Free, Private, No Upload

What actually changes in this conversion

• Both PNG and TGA are lossless, so the pixels come through unchanged.
• Transparency is preserved, including soft edges.
• Expect the TGA file to be far larger than the PNG source.
• EXIF, GPS and camera data are stripped on every conversion. That is good for privacy, but you lose capture dates.

About PNG: history and technical details

Created in 1995 as a free, patent-unencumbered replacement for GIF after Unisys began charging royalties for LZW compression. Became a W3C Recommendation in 2003. The signature bytes are 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A — "PNG" with newlines designed to catch file corruption.

Technical: Uses DEFLATE (LZ77 + Huffman) compression. Two main modes: 8/16-bit truecolour with alpha, and 8-bit indexed with up to 256 colours. Filters per scanline (None, Sub, Up, Average, Paeth) before DEFLATE for better ratios.

Real-world size: A 1920x1080 screenshot is 200-600 KB as PNG. As JPG at quality 85 it is 100-300 KB but with blurry text. A 12-MP photo is 18-25 MB as PNG, 2-4 MB as JPG. PNG wins on text, JPG wins on photos.

Popular tools: Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Figma, Sketch, Snipping Tool, macOS Screenshot, ImageMagick, pngquant, oxipng.

Alternatives: WebP lossless (20-30% smaller), AVIF (better for photos), JPG (photos only), SVG (vector graphics).

About TGA: what you get

Created by Truevision in 1984 for the TARGA and VISTA graphics cards. It became a standard for video editing (Windows and Mac) and later game texture pipelines. Still widely used in Unity, Unreal and 3D tools.

Technical: 18-byte header with image type, colour map, width, height, bit depth. Types 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11 for uncompressed and RLE variants. Supports 8-bit indexed, 15/16-bit high colour, 24-bit truecolour, 32-bit with alpha. Bottom-left origin by default.

Real-world size: A 1024x1024 32-bit TGA is 4 MB uncompressed, 1-3 MB with RLE. A 2048x2048 texture is 16 MB uncompressed. Game engines prefer DDS or KTX2 for shipping but TGA for authoring.

Popular tools: Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender, GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, ImageMagick, NVIDIA Texture Tools.

Alternatives: DDS (better for games), KTX2 (modern GPU texture), PNG (universal), WebP (web).

Browser and software compatibility

PNG: Opens in every browser and image editor. TGA: Supported by game engines and 3D tools, but not displayed by browsers.

Browsers will not display TGA. It is meant for game and 3D pipelines.

Why people move away from PNG

• A PNG of a photograph is commonly several times larger than the same image as JPG or WebP, which hurts page weight.
• Screenshots and photos exported as PNG are among the heaviest assets on many sites.
• Some upload forms and print services reject PNG or downscale it aggressively.

Why people choose TGA

• Many game engines, 3D tools and texture pipelines still accept TGA with an alpha channel.
• The simple layout loads quickly and is easy for custom tools to parse.

Common mistakes with PNG

• Using PNG for photographs — files are 5-10x larger than JPG with no visible benefit
• Saving screenshots as JPG by mistake — text becomes blurry and unreadable
• Forgetting PNG transparency — white backgrounds appear where there should be alpha

Best practices for keeping quality

• PNG sources often contain transparency. Decide before converting what should replace it: white, black or a brand colour.
• If your engine prefers power-of-two textures (512, 1024, 2048), resize before converting.
• Alpha is preserved, but check that the transparent areas match what your engine expects.
• Resize before converting if the image will be shown small. A 4000 pixel photo displayed at 800 pixels wastes bytes in any format.
• Check the result at 100 percent zoom, especially around text, edges and gradients, before you replace any originals.
• Keep your original files. Conversions to a lossy format cannot be undone.
• When you convert a set of images, use the same quality setting for the whole batch. The converter handles up to 20 files at once.