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What Is AVIF and Why Does It Matter?

AVIF — which stands for AV1 Image File Format — is the newest generation of image compression technology, built on the AV1 video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. It was designed from the ground up to replace older formats like JPEG, PNG, and even WebP with dramatically better compression efficiency. In real-world testing, AVIF files are typically 50% smaller than equivalent JPEG files at the same visual quality, and 20–30% smaller than WebP.

What makes this especially remarkable is that AVIF achieves smaller file sizes while also delivering superior quality. JPEG uses a compression algorithm developed in 1992, which means it introduces characteristic blocky artefacts at higher compression ratios — the "JPEG smearing" that is immediately recognisable around high-contrast edges and text. AVIF uses a completely different mathematical approach that avoids these artefacts, producing cleaner, more natural-looking images even at very high compression settings.

For website owners and developers, AVIF represents one of the most impactful optimisations available today. Images typically account for 60–80% of a webpage's total data transfer. Cutting that by half directly improves page load times, reduces bandwidth costs, and improves Core Web Vitals scores — all of which have direct implications for both user experience and search engine ranking.

Browser Support: Where Does AVIF Work Today?

As of 2024, AVIF is supported in Chrome (since version 85, released 2020), Firefox (since version 93, released 2021), Safari (since version 16.0 on macOS Ventura and iOS 16, released 2022), and Edge (since version 121, released 2024). Combined, these browsers cover approximately 90% of global web traffic. For the remaining browsers, the standard approach is to use a picture element with AVIF as the first source and JPEG or WebP as a fallback.

The near-universal browser support means that 2024 and beyond is the right time to adopt AVIF for web images. The format has cleared the early-adopter risk phase and is now a safe production choice for the vast majority of websites and applications.

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AVIF vs JPEG vs WebP vs PNG: A Practical Comparison

Understanding how AVIF stacks up against existing formats helps you make informed decisions about when to use it and what to expect. The comparison depends heavily on the type of image — photographic content, illustrations, images with transparency, and graphics all behave differently under each format's compression algorithm.

When AVIF Saves the Most Space

AVIF delivers its most dramatic file size reductions on photographic content — product photography, landscape photos, portraits, and any image with continuous tonal gradations. For a typical high-resolution product photograph, converting from JPEG to AVIF at matching visual quality commonly produces a file 40–60% smaller. For highly detailed textures and natural scenes, the savings can exceed 70%.

For graphic content with sharp edges, solid colours, and text — like logos, icons, and UI screenshots — AVIF is still better than JPEG but the advantage over PNG narrows, since PNG's lossless compression handles this type of content very efficiently and AVIF is primarily a lossy format (though lossless AVIF is also supported).

For images with transparency, AVIF's alpha channel support means it can replace PNG for transparent images while delivering far smaller file sizes — unlike JPEG, which has no transparency support at all.

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Understanding AVIF Quality Settings

When converting to AVIF, the most important setting is the quality level. Our converter uses a 1–100 scale where higher numbers produce better-looking images at the cost of larger file sizes. Here is a practical guide to choosing the right quality setting for different use cases.

Recommended Quality Levels by Use Case

For e-commerce product photography where fine detail matters — fabric texture, product labels, stitching — a quality setting of 75–85 is appropriate. This produces files that look visually identical to the original JPEG to most viewers while cutting file size by 40–55%. For hero images and editorial photography where visual impact matters more than pixel-level detail, 60–75 gives excellent results with 55–65% file size reduction. For thumbnail images, preview images, and content that will be displayed small on screen, quality settings of 40–60 are often perfectly adequate and produce the smallest possible files.

It is worth noting that AVIF quality settings are not directly comparable to JPEG quality settings. AVIF 80 does not produce the same output as JPEG 80. Generally, AVIF achieves equivalent visual quality to JPEG at roughly 10–20 points lower quality setting — meaning AVIF 70 often looks as good as JPEG 85 or 90, at significantly smaller file sizes.

Chroma Subsampling Explained

Chroma subsampling is a technique that stores colour information at a lower resolution than brightness information, based on the fact that human vision is more sensitive to brightness differences than colour differences. The three common settings — 4:2:0, 4:2:2, and 4:4:4 — represent how much colour detail is preserved relative to luminance detail.

For photographic content viewed on screen, 4:2:0 (the most aggressive chroma reduction) is generally indistinguishable from 4:4:4 to the human eye and produces the smallest files. For images containing text, sharp colour boundaries, or content that will be edited further, 4:4:4 is the right choice because it preserves full colour fidelity. The 4:2:2 setting is a useful middle ground for images with some mixed content.

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How to Implement AVIF on Your Website

Once you have converted your images to AVIF format, you need to serve them correctly on the web. The recommended approach is to use the HTML picture element with multiple source formats, allowing browsers that support AVIF to use it while falling back to WebP or JPEG for older browsers. This approach requires no JavaScript and has zero performance overhead.

The picture Element Pattern

The standard implementation looks like this in your HTML: you wrap an img element inside a picture element, and add source elements before it listing your AVIF and WebP versions. The browser tries each source in order and uses the first format it supports. The img element acts as the final fallback and is what gets displayed if no source matches. This pattern gives you AVIF for modern browsers, WebP for browsers that support it but not AVIF, and JPEG for everything else — maximum compatibility with no sacrifice in modern performance.

For websites using content management systems or image delivery networks, many platforms now support automatic AVIF conversion and serving. Cloudflare Images, Cloudinary, Imgix, and similar services can automatically serve AVIF to supported browsers from a single uploaded source file, handling the format negotiation server-side via the Accept header.

Core Web Vitals and AVIF

Google's Core Web Vitals metrics — particularly Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — are directly affected by image optimisation. LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element to load, which is typically a hero image. Reducing that image from a 400 KB JPEG to a 180 KB AVIF directly improves LCP, which in turn affects your search ranking through Google's page experience signals. The return on investment for converting key images to AVIF is measurable, trackable, and immediate.

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Privacy and Security: Why Browser-Based Conversion Is the Right Choice

When you use this tool to convert images, your files never leave your device. All processing happens locally using the browser's Canvas API and JavaScript. There is no server receiving your images, no cloud storage involved, and no company seeing your image data. The page itself contains all the code needed to perform the conversion — once loaded, it works completely offline.

This makes the tool appropriate for converting sensitive images: confidential product photos before a launch, personal photographs, client work under NDA, medical imaging, legal documents, or any images where data security matters. Many online converters upload your images to remote servers for processing — creating privacy risks, potential data retention, and security exposures that simply do not exist with client-side processing.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Is AVIF really noticeably better than JPEG? Yes, especially at moderate-to-high compression ratios. At quality settings where JPEG produces noticeable artefacts, AVIF typically still looks clean. For maximum quality (low compression), the difference is smaller, but file sizes still favour AVIF significantly.
• Can I convert PNG to AVIF to preserve transparency? Yes. Upload a PNG with an alpha channel, enable the "Preserve transparency" toggle, and download as AVIF — the transparency is retained. This lets you replace large PNG files with much smaller AVIF files without losing the transparent background.
• Will all my website visitors see AVIF images? Approximately 90% of global browser users are on browsers that support AVIF. For the other 10%, use the picture element pattern with JPEG or WebP fallbacks to ensure everyone sees a correctly formatted image.
• Why does conversion happen in the browser instead of a server? Browser-based conversion is private, fast (no upload/download latency), works offline, and has no file size limits imposed by server quotas. The Canvas API provides reliable AVIF encoding in all modern browsers.
• Does converting from JPEG to AVIF cause quality loss? Any transcoding between lossy formats involves some generation loss, since you are re-compressing already compressed data. To minimise this, use a high quality setting (80+) for AVIF output when the source is a JPEG. If you have access to the original uncompressed or RAW source, convert from that instead for the best possible AVIF output quality.
• What is the encode speed setting? This controls how much computational effort the encoder spends optimising the compression. Speed 0 takes longer but produces the smallest possible file for a given quality level. Speed 10 converts very quickly but the output file will be slightly larger. For most use cases, the default of 6 is a good balance.
• Can I batch convert hundreds of images? Yes. Select as many files as you like and they will all be converted in sequence. Each file shows its own progress indicator. The download all button packages every converted file for easy saving.