What is AVIF?

AVIF is the newest image format you'll run into, and often the smallest. Here's what it actually is, why your phone or software might not open it yet, and how to convert one when it doesn't.

AVIF in one sentence

AVIF is an image format built on AV1, a video codec, that typically produces the smallest files of any format in common use today, while also being free for anyone to use without paying a licence.

Where AVIF came from

AVIF was published in 2019 by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium that includes Google, Mozilla, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple among its members. The 'AV' in AV1 stands for the alliance's own video codec, and AVIF is simply that codec's compression applied to a single still frame instead of a moving one, wrapped in a container format borrowed from HEIF, the same container Apple's HEIC uses.

That shared container is not a coincidence. AVIF exists largely because HEIC couldn't be adopted freely. HEIC compresses with HEVC, and HEVC is covered by patents held by a long list of separate companies, each expecting royalties from anyone shipping a decoder. Browser makers were not willing to pay that, so the same alliance that built AV1 as a royalty-free alternative to HEVC for video did the equivalent for still images, using the container format everyone already understood.

The result is a format that behaves like HEIC technically, comparable compression, comparable extra features, but carries none of its licensing baggage. That difference is the entire reason AVIF exists as a separate format rather than everyone just using HEIC.

How much smaller is AVIF, really

The honest answer is that it depends heavily on what's in the image, more than for most format comparisons. AV1 is a considerably newer, more sophisticated codec than either JPG's or WebP's compression, and it tends to pull further ahead specifically on complex, detailed photographs, where older codecs waste more bits.

Figures commonly cited put AVIF at roughly 20 to 50% smaller than WebP at matched visual quality, and often around half the size of an equivalent JPG. Both ends of those ranges show up in real testing depending on the source image, so treat any single number you see quoted, including the ones in this paragraph, as an average across a test set rather than a guarantee for your specific photo.

What is consistent is the direction: AVIF is essentially never larger than WebP or JPG for the same visual quality, only sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot.

What AVIF can do that older formats can't

Beyond raw file size, AVIF carries the same category of extra capability that made HEIC useful to Apple. It supports HDR, wide colour gamuts and up to 12 bits per colour channel, where JPG is capped at 8, which matters specifically for images with smooth, wide gradients, a clear sky, a sunset, where JPG can show faint banding and AVIF doesn't.

It supports a full alpha channel for transparency, and it supports animation, occupying the same space WebP does there, generally at a smaller file size for the same clip.

It also supports the same kind of multi-image container structure HEIC uses, so a single AVIF file can in principle hold more than one image or a depth map, though in practice, out on the open web, you will almost always meet it as one plain still photo.

AVIF vs WebP

WebP had a decade's head start and it shows in how widely it's already supported. AVIF generally compresses better, sometimes considerably better, but WebP is the safer choice today if broad compatibility across older phones, embedded devices and less current software matters more to you than squeezing out the last few percent of file size.

For a website with a broad, unpredictable audience, the practical answer most platforms have landed on is to serve AVIF to browsers that ask for it and fall back to WebP or JPG for everything else, rather than picking one format and living with its gaps. You don't have to choose only one if the platform serving your images supports content negotiation, and most current ones do.

Browser and OS support

Chrome added AVIF support in version 85, in August 2020. Firefox followed in version 93 in late 2021. Safari was again the last of the major browsers, adding support in Safari 16 alongside macOS Ventura and iOS 16, both in 2022, roughly two years behind Chrome.

That gap matters more here than it did for WebP, because it means a meaningful number of devices still in daily use, particularly older phones and anything running an operating system from before 2022, simply cannot display an AVIF file at all, depending on the app, not even as a proper broken-image placeholder in some cases.

Windows can preview AVIF files in the modern Photos app after installing the free 'AV1 Video Extension' from the Microsoft Store, which despite the name also supplies the still-image decoder. As with WebP and HEIC before it, that fixes viewing one file at a time and does nothing for converting a folder of them.

AVIF vs HEIC: the comparison people actually mean

These two are close enough technically that the real difference is almost entirely about who can open them. HEIC is restricted by HEVC's licensing to devices and software willing to pay for it, which in practice means it works well across the Apple ecosystem and is patchy almost everywhere else. AVIF was built specifically to avoid that problem and is royalty-free by design, which is why browser makers adopted it and never adopted HEIC.

If you're choosing a format to publish with rather than one your phone chose for you, AVIF is the more future-proof pick of the two for exactly that reason. If you're dealing with a HEIC file your iPhone already produced, converting it to something more universally readable, JPG for compatibility, AVIF or WebP if you want to keep the smaller size, solves the same underlying problem HEIC has always had.

Where you'll actually run into an AVIF file today

The most common source is a website itself. Many content management systems and platforms, including a lot of e-commerce and blogging software, now automatically generate and serve AVIF to any visitor whose browser asks for it, from a JPG or PNG the site owner originally uploaded, without the owner doing anything to request it.

That means a right-click 'Save image' on a modern, well-optimised site can hand you an AVIF file the same way it might hand you a WebP one, for exactly the same reason: your browser told the server it could handle the smaller format, so the server sent it.

It shows up less often as something a person deliberately created and sent to someone else, most cameras and phones still default to JPG or HEIC, not AVIF, so if you're holding an AVIF file, it most likely came from a website rather than a camera.

Converting AVIF to JPG, PNG or WebP

When an AVIF file lands somewhere that won't accept it, an older editor, a form that only lists JPG and PNG, a printing service, converting solves it the same way it does for HEIC or WebP: drop the file into the AVIF converter on this site and pick whichever output the destination actually wants. JPG is the safest general-purpose choice, PNG if the source needs to stay lossless or keep transparency, WebP if you want to keep most of the size saving while gaining far wider compatibility than AVIF currently has.

The conversion runs entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded to make it happen, and you can verify that yourself: open the page, disconnect from the internet, and convert a file anyway. Batch conversion handles up to 200 files in one run if you're working through more than a single image.

Should you worry about AVIF

Not for personal photo storage today. Your phone almost certainly isn't producing AVIF files on its own yet, so this is not a format decision most people need to actively make for their own photo library the way the HEIC-versus-JPG decision sometimes is.

If you publish images on the web, letting your platform serve AVIF automatically where it already offers to is a straightforward size win with no real downside, since the fallback to WebP or JPG for older browsers is usually handled for you. If you're on the receiving end of an AVIF file that something won't open, converting it takes a few seconds and loses nothing that would matter for ordinary use.

Editing and re-saving an AVIF file

The same generational-loss caution that applies to JPG and lossy WebP applies to AVIF: resaving a lossy AVIF repeatedly compounds the loss each time. Work from your original file for any further edits and only export to AVIF as a final step, rather than round-tripping through it more than once.

Editor support lags behind browser support here, which is the reverse of the usual pattern for a new format. Most major browsers reached AVIF well before most image editors did, so it is more common right now to be able to view an AVIF file everywhere than to be able to open and re-edit one in whatever software you already use.

Where that matters practically: if you need to make further changes to a photo you only have as AVIF, converting it to PNG first, to preserve everything losslessly, then editing the PNG, is currently the more reliable path than looking for an editor that opens AVIF directly.

AVIF and HDR photography

One of AVIF's more specific advantages shows up with HDR, high dynamic range, photos and video stills, images captured with a wider range of brightness and colour than a standard display or a standard JPG can represent. AVIF can store that extra range directly, where JPG structurally cannot.

In practice this matters most for content shot on a phone or camera with an HDR mode, and for anything with a genuinely wide range of brightness in the same frame, a bright sky against a shadowed foreground, a sunset, stage lighting against a dark venue. Compressed down to ordinary JPG, that extra range is simply gone, flattened to what JPG's 8 bits per channel can hold.

For an everyday snapshot without a wide brightness range to begin with, this advantage is close to invisible, there is nothing extra in the original to preserve. It becomes worth caring about specifically for HDR-captured content, which is an increasing share of what phones shoot by default, more than for photography in general.

Common myths about AVIF worth clearing up

'AVIF is always better than WebP' overstates it. AVIF usually compresses better, sometimes considerably so, but 'usually' isn't 'always', and WebP remains the safer choice anywhere support for older devices matters more than shaving off the last few percent of file size.

'AVIF will replace JPG soon' is unlikely on any short timeline. JPG's advantage isn't technical any more, it's the fact that literally everything from the last three decades can open one. Formats with better compression have coexisted with JPG for years without displacing it, and AVIF's browser-support gap on older devices makes full replacement even less likely soon.

'AVIF is just for websites' undersells where it's headed. Camera and phone manufacturers have started experimenting with it as a capture format in a small but growing number of devices, following the same path HEIC took a few years earlier, though it remains far less common as a capture format than as a web-delivery one today.

AVIF file extensions and the confusion around them

AVIF files most commonly carry a .avif extension, but because the format shares HEIF's container lineage, you will occasionally see one saved with a .heif extension instead, particularly from software that treats the container format as the defining one rather than the compression inside it.

This is the same naming ambiguity that already exists around HEIC and HEIF, just one layer further along, and the practical answer is the same: what actually determines whether something opens is the compression inside the file, not the three or four letters after the dot. If a file with either extension won't open, converting it is the fix regardless of which extension it happened to arrive with.

None of this affects how the converter on this site handles a file: whatever the extension, if the underlying data is AVIF-compressed, it reads it and outputs whichever format you choose. If a specific file genuinely won't decode, it is more likely mislabeled entirely than a container mismatch, and worth double-checking with whatever software produced it.

Is it worth converting to AVIF yourself

If you're publishing images through a platform that already offers to serve AVIF automatically, letting it do so costs you nothing and saves your visitors real bandwidth. If you're manually preparing images for a personal site or project, AVIF is worth using specifically where you control both the encoding and can guarantee a fallback, since not every visitor's browser will read it yet.

For personal archiving or sending photos to other people rather than publishing them, there's little reason to convert to AVIF specifically. The format's advantages are strongest for web delivery at scale, where a small per-image saving multiplies across many visitors, and weakest for a single photo going to a single recipient, where JPG's universal compatibility matters more than a few extra kilobytes saved.

Deciding whether a specific file needs to be AVIF at all

Not every image benefits equally from AVIF's extra compression, and it's worth asking what you're actually optimising for before reaching for it specifically. A large photo gallery on a busy website benefits enormously, because the saving multiplies across every visitor and every page load. A single photo you're sending to one person barely benefits at all, because there's only one download to save bandwidth on, and the recipient's software is far more likely to open a JPG without any friction.

The same logic applies to how much effort is worth spending on the decision. For a personal blog or a small project, letting your platform handle AVIF automatically where it already offers to, and not thinking about it further, is the right level of effort. For a large commercial site where image weight measurably affects load time, it can be worth actively auditing which images are served in which format and checking the fallback behaviour actually works on older browsers.

For everyday personal use, receiving photos, storing them, occasionally converting one that won't open somewhere, the format sitting behind the scenes matters far less than whether the specific file in front of you opens where you need it to. That's the practical question this guide, and the converter it sits next to, actually exists to answer.

A note on AVIF for icons and product graphics

AVIF is capable of representing flat graphics, logos and icons just as losslessly as WebP or PNG can, but in practice it is rarely used for them. Most of the tooling and most of the attention around AVIF has focused on photographic compression, where its advantage over older formats is largest, so the ecosystem of design tools that default to it for graphics work is still thin compared to what exists for PNG and WebP.

That's a practical observation rather than a technical limitation. There's nothing stopping AVIF from being a fine choice for an icon or a logo, it's simply not where most people reach for it yet, and PNG or lossless WebP remain the more conventional, more widely expected choice for that kind of asset today.

If you do encounter an AVIF icon or graphic, most likely from a specific design tool's export options rather than general practice, it opens and converts the same way any other AVIF file does, there's no separate handling needed just because the content is graphical rather than photographic.

Expect that balance to shift over the next few years rather than stay fixed. Formats generally pick up graphics-tool support only after they've already become common for photography, WebP followed roughly that same order, so AVIF turning up more often in design-tool export menus is a matter of when, not whether.

Quick questions

Converters

The converter on this page handles every conversion this guide talks about.

• JPG to AVIF converter
• AVIF to JPG converter
• AVIF to WebP converter