What a AVIF file is
What a .AVIF file is, what it does well, what opens one, and how to convert it — with every conversion running in your own browser.
What a AVIF file is
An AVIF is a still frame from the AV1 video codec, saved as an image. That sounds like a technicality and is in fact the whole point: video compression has had a decade of intense investment that still-image formats have not, and AVIF inherits all of it.
The result is the smallest photographs of anything here — commonly half the size of a JPG at quality most people cannot tell apart, and noticeably better than WebP at the low bitrates where the older formats start to visibly fall apart.
It is also the slowest to encode by a wide margin, and the newest, which means the least widely supported outside browsers. AVIF is a format to convert *to* for the web and a format to convert *from* when anything else has to open the file.
Where it came from
AVIF was specified in 2019 by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium formed by companies that had grown tired of paying video codec licences. It is royalty-free by design, which is why browsers adopted it quickly and why it is the first serious challenger to JPG that is not owned by anyone.
AVIF at a glance
| Property | AVIF |
|---|---|
| Compression | Lossless or lossy |
| Colour | 12 bits per channel |
| Transparency | Full alpha channel |
| Animation | Yes |
| Keeps EXIF | Yes |
| Browser support | Chrome 85, Firefox 93, Safari 16 |
| Size of a photograph | 40 to 60 percent smaller than a JPG |
| Published | 2019 |
AVIF at a glance
- The format supports both lossy and lossless compression, and a file does not announce which it used in a way most viewers show. This site's encoder writes the lossy kind.
- Colour is stored as 12 bits per channel, which is enough for the gradients in a photograph to look smooth rather than stepped.
- Transparency is a full alpha channel: each pixel records how transparent it is, so a soft edge stays soft against any background.
- The container holds more than one frame, so converting to a still format keeps the first and discards the rest.
- Camera settings, dates, and copyright fields travel with the image, which matters if you are converting photographs you intend to keep attribution for.
What it is good at
- Full transparency: each pixel records how transparent it is, so edges blend cleanly into any background.
- Holds several frames and plays them, so it can carry a short looping clip.
- Compresses either way: with loss for photographs, without it for flat graphics, in the same format.
- Carries camera settings, dates, and copyright information alongside the image.
- Roughly 40 to 60 per cent smaller than a JPG of the same photograph at matching visible quality.
Where it falls short
- Read only by newer browsers: Chrome 85, Firefox 93, Safari 16.
What to use instead of AVIF
- For an image that has to display everywhere without a fallback, use PNG or JPG. Both have been read by every browser for longer than most of the alternatives have existed.
When to use AVIF
Choose AVIF for photographs on a page where size matters and the audience is on the web — a gallery, a product listing, an article with large images. It is the smallest of anything here at a given visible quality, often by a wide margin.
Avoid AVIF as a storage format, and avoid it for files you are handing to other people. Encoding is slow, older devices and most desktop software cannot open one, and a photograph archive in a format nothing reads is an archive you will have to convert in ten years.
What opens a AVIF file
On a computer, AVIF files open in GIMP 2.10 and later, Photoshop with a plugin.
Browser support is more recent: Chrome 85, Firefox 93, Safari 16. An older browser will offer to download the file rather than show it.
Turn a AVIF file into something else:
Produce a AVIF file from something else:
Common problems with AVIF
- Only the first frame came out.
- The format you converted to holds one image, so there was nowhere for the remaining frames to go. Convert to animated WebP if the movement matters. It stores the same animation in a fraction of the size, with full colour and proper transparency.
- It displays for me and not for some visitors.
- Support for this format arrived relatively recently, so an older browser or an out-of-date device may not read it. Serve an older format alongside it and let the browser choose, or convert to PNG or JPG if you cannot control the markup.
Converting a AVIF file here
- Choose your file, or drag it onto the box. It is read from your device and goes no further.
- Set whatever the conversion offers — quality, size, background — and start it. Everything runs on your own machine, so a large image uses your memory and your processor rather than a queue somewhere.
- Download the result. Nothing is kept: leaving the page or resetting it releases the file and the converted copy alike.
AVIF against the alternatives
Common questions
- Should I convert my photo library to AVIF?
- Probably not. AVIF is excellent for images you are publishing and awkward for images you are keeping: most photo managers, printing services, and older devices cannot read one. Convert to AVIF at the point of publishing, and keep the originals in whatever your camera produced.
- Why is converting to AVIF so slow?
- Because the compression is genuinely doing more work. AVIF searches far harder for ways to describe the image compactly than JPG does, and that search is what produces the smaller file. On a large photograph the difference can be seconds rather than milliseconds.
- Is AVIF better than WebP?
- For photographs, usually yes — noticeably smaller at the same visible quality, and much better at low bitrates where WebP starts to smear. For flat graphics the gap narrows, and WebP encodes far faster and is supported more widely, so it remains the safer default.
- Is transparency kept when I convert a AVIF file?
- Only if the format you convert to has somewhere to put it. PNG, WebP, AVIF, and GIF all do, to varying degrees; JPG and BMP do not, and a transparent area becomes a solid colour when you convert to one. The tool tells you which background it used.
- Do all the frames survive a conversion?
- Only when the target format animates too. Converting to a still format keeps the first frame and drops the rest, which is usually not what somebody wants and is easy to do by accident. Animated WebP is the format to convert to if the movement matters.
- What happens to the camera data and copyright fields?
- They survive where the target format has somewhere to keep them and are dropped where it does not. If attribution matters, check the result rather than assume — metadata is the first thing most conversions lose, and it goes silently.
- How much smaller or larger will the file get?
- The table above states the size of the same photograph in each format against JPG, which is the closest thing to an answer that holds in general. The real figure depends on the picture: flat colour and sharp edges behave very differently from a photograph, and the ranges assume a photograph.
- How do I open a .AVIF file?
- The software listed above reads them directly. If nothing on your machine will, converting to PNG or JPG is the reliable route — both open in everything, and the conversion happens here in your browser rather than on a server.
- Does converting a AVIF file lose quality?
- It depends on what you convert it to rather than on what you convert from. Converting to a lossless format such as PNG preserves every pixel; converting to JPG, WebP, or AVIF discards detail permanently. Nothing recovers quality the file had already lost.
- Is converting from AVIF free, and does it upload my file?
- Free, with no account, and nothing is uploaded. Every converter on this site reads your file with the browser's own file APIs, converts it using code running on your device, and hands the result back as a download. You can confirm that yourself in the Network panel of your browser's developer tools.
- Where does the conversion happen?
- In your browser, on your own device. There is no conversion server here to upload anything to, and no third-party service is involved. That is a statement about what the site does rather than a promise about how it handles uploads, because no upload takes place.