Written by the founder of BreezeConvert — a creative director working across set design, game 3D, Unreal/VFX and AI content pipelines. More about the author.
Every few years a new image format arrives promising smaller files and better quality, and most of them quietly disappear. AVIF is one of the few that actually delivered — and it's now supported widely enough to use for real. But "better compression" doesn't automatically mean you should switch everything to it. Here's what AVIF is, honestly where it wins and loses, and how to decide.
What AVIF actually is
AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is a still-image format built on the compression technology from the AV1 video codec. Because it borrows a modern video codec's tricks, it compresses images remarkably well — typically producing noticeably smaller files than JPG or even WebP at the same visual quality, and the gap is widest at small file sizes where JPG would fall apart into blocky artifacts. It also supports transparency, wide colour, and HDR, which older formats handle poorly or not at all.
Where AVIF wins
The headline benefit is size. For photographs and complex images destined for the web, AVIF can shave a substantial chunk off the file with no visible loss — which means faster page loads and less bandwidth. If you run a site where image weight matters (a portfolio, a shop, a media-heavy blog), AVIF is one of the highest-impact optimisations available. It's especially strong on gradients and detailed photographic content, exactly where JPG struggles.
Where AVIF still trips up
Two honest caveats keep AVIF from being an automatic choice. First, support isn't quite universal. Current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all read AVIF, but older browsers, some apps, email clients, and design tools still don't — so an AVIF you send to a colleague or upload to a form may simply fail to open. Second, encoding is slow. Squeezing an image into AVIF takes real computation, so batch-converting many large images can be sluggish, particularly in a browser.
There's also a subtler point: for simple graphics with hard edges and few colours — logos, icons, screenshots — a lossless PNG or WebP is often just as small and more compatible, so AVIF's advantage mostly shows on photographic content.
AVIF vs WebP vs JPG — the short version
JPG is the universal safe choice for photos: it opens everywhere, but it's the least efficient. WebP is the modern all-rounder — smaller than JPG, supports transparency, and now has near-universal support, which makes it the best default for the web today. AVIF pushes compression furthest and is the best choice when file size is critical and you can accept slightly narrower support (or serve it with a WebP/JPG fallback). Many sites use all three: AVIF first, WebP as a fallback, JPG as the last resort, chosen automatically per browser.
How to use AVIF safely
If you're publishing to the web and can set up fallbacks, reach for AVIF for your heaviest photographic images and let older browsers fall back to WebP. If you're just sending an image to a person or uploading to a form, stick with JPG or PNG to avoid "it won't open" problems. And if someone sends you an AVIF that your software can't read, convert it to something universal.
Both directions run locally in our image converter — convert to AVIF to shrink images for the web, or from AVIF to JPG/PNG/WebP when you need compatibility — with nothing uploaded. If you're weighing the formats generally, the PNG vs JPG vs WebP guide covers the full decision.