AVIF is an image format based on AV1, a royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a group that includes Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon. The format was finalised in 2019. Like HEIC, it stores images inside a HEIF container, but it uses the AV1 codec instead of the patent-licensed HEVC.
What AVIF is good at
- Very small files. AVIF often beats JPG by 50% or more and WebP by around 20% at similar quality, especially at low file sizes where it avoids JPEG’s blocky artefacts.
- HDR and wide colour. 10- and 12-bit colour depth lets AVIF hold high dynamic range photos.
- Transparency and animation, like WebP.
- No licence fees, which helped browsers adopt it quickly.
Where AVIF falls short
- Encoding is slow. Creating AVIF files takes much more processing than JPG or WebP, which matters when generating thousands of images.
- Support outside browsers. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari 16.4 and later all display AVIF, but many photo viewers, office suites, older editors and upload forms don’t yet.
- Fine detail at high quality. At high quality settings the size advantage over a well-tuned JPG shrinks, and some textures can look smoothed.
AVIF on websites
Image services and content delivery networks increasingly send AVIF to browsers that accept it, falling back to WebP or JPG for others. So, as with WebP, saving a picture from a website can give you an .avif file even though the site’s original was a JPG.
Common AVIF conversions
Convert AVIF to JPG to open, edit, print or upload images in places that don’t support AVIF yet. Converting the other way, from JPG or PNG to AVIF, is mainly useful for web developers optimising site images.