Overview
AVIF was published by the Alliance for Open Media in 2019. It stores AV1-compressed images inside the HEIF container (the same container family as Apple’s HEIC), but without HEVC’s patent licensing.
AVIF supports 8-, 10- and 12-bit colour, HDR, wide colour gamuts, full alpha transparency, lossless compression and image sequences. At low and medium quality it preserves far more detail than JPEG at the same size.
Browser support arrived in Chrome 85 (2020), Firefox 93 (2021) and Safari 16 (2022), so AVIF now works for the vast majority of web users. Encoding is slower than JPEG or WebP, which is why JFIF.IO shows progress while it works.
Advantages
- +Best compression of any widely supported format
- +Transparency, HDR and 10/12-bit colour
- +Royalty-free
- +Supported by all current major browsers
Disadvantages
- −Slow to encode, especially large images
- −Limited support in older software and editors
- −Very fine textures can be smoothed at low quality
- −Large images are stored as tile grids, which some decoders handle poorly
How AVIF compression works
AVIF uses AV1 intra-frame coding: the image is divided into superblocks of up to 128×128 pixels that are recursively split into smaller blocks. Each block is predicted with one of many directional or smooth intra-prediction modes, the residual is transformed (DCT, ADST or identity transforms of various sizes), quantised and entropy-coded with an adaptive arithmetic coder. Post-filters (CDEF and loop restoration) remove ringing and blocking artefacts.
Common use cases
- High-traffic websites where every kilobyte counts
- Photo galleries and e-commerce product images
- HDR photos
Browser and software support
Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari 16+ display AVIF. Windows 11 and recent macOS versions open AVIF files; many older editors do not yet.
How to convert AVIF
Use the converter at the top of this page: drop your file, choose an output format and download the result. Conversions run in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.
- JPG has no transparency. Transparent areas will be filled with the background colour.
- Animated images: only the first frame is converted.
Processed locally in your browser
AVIF FAQ
AVIF or WebP — which should I use?
AVIF usually produces smaller files at the same quality, especially for photos. WebP encodes faster and is supported by slightly older browsers. Many sites serve AVIF with a WebP or JPEG fallback using the HTML <picture> element.
Why is AVIF conversion slower?
The AV1 encoder searches many prediction and transform options to find the smallest representation. That work happens once, when you convert; decoding in the browser is fast.
Does AVIF support transparency?
Yes, with a full alpha channel, in both lossy and lossless modes.
Can AVIF be lossless?
Yes. Enable “Lossless” in the converter settings. Lossless AVIF files are larger than lossy ones but keep every pixel.