What you should know
AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is a recent image format derived from the AV1 video codec. It promises dramatic size savings — often 50% less than a JPEG at equivalent quality — and supports transparency, HDR and high colour depths.
Adoption is growing in browsers, but encoding remains slow and software support limited. It is a format of the future, not yet a de facto standard.
Strengths
- Very efficient compression, especially at low bitrate
- Transparency and HDR supported
- Open format, royalty-free
- Ideal for performance-conscious websites
Limitations to know
- Slow, resource-hungry encoding
- Still partial support outside recent browsers
- Few retouching applications can save it
- Lossy conversion from JPEG: size gain at the cost of a re-encode
When to use it
Use AVIF when page weight is critical and your audience uses recent browsers. For broad compatibility, especially by email or with old tools, JPEG or PNG remain essential. In every case, plan a fallback: a site serving AVIF alone excludes some visitors.
Quality, size and compatibility
At low bitrate, AVIF clearly beats JPEG and often WebP. At high quality the gap narrows. Because encoding is slow, convert important images first rather than entire batches.
Frequently asked questions
- Can AVIF be used on a site today?
- Yes, provided you include a fallback image in WebP or JPEG for browsers that cannot read it. The picture element exists precisely for this.
- Why is AVIF conversion so slow?
- The AV1 encoder explores many combinations to compress each image as well as possible. Computation time is the price of the size gain.