AVIF in one paragraph
HEIC and AVIF are close cousins. Both sit in the same HEIF container; HEIC fills it with HEVC (H.265) compression, AVIF with AV1. The big difference is licensing and adoption: AV1 is royalty-free, so browser makers embraced it, and AVIF now displays in all the major current browsers. HEIC, meanwhile, is still mostly an Apple thing. Converting HEIC to AVIF keeps much of HEIC’s efficiency while making the image usable on the open web.
What to expect: smaller files, slower encoding
AVIF’s strength is size. For photos on a web page it often beats WebP, and usually beats JPG by a wide margin at similar visual quality. The price is encoding time.
| JPG | WebP | AVIF | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical size | Largest | Smaller | Smallest |
| Encoding speed | Very fast | Fast | Seconds per photo |
| Metadata kept | Yes | Yes | No |
| Opens everywhere | Yes | Most places | Modern browsers |
On a recent laptop, a batch of 50 photos is a coffee break, not a lunch break. On a phone it takes longer, because we limit work to one or two photos at a time so the browser doesn’t run out of memory. Want speed today and smaller files later? HEIC to WebP is a fine compromise.
Support caveats worth knowing
AVIF is a web format first. Before you commit, check where the files are going:
- Websites you control: great choice. Serve AVIF with a WebP or JPG fallback for older browsers.
- CMS and site builders: many accept AVIF uploads, some don’t yet. Test one file before converting a whole gallery.
- Email, printing, old desktop apps: use JPG. AVIF support there is unreliable.
- Archiving originals: keep the HEIC. Converting anything lossy to another lossy format loses a little more each time.
Tuning quality
The default of 60 is a good starting point for photos on a page. Fine textures like hair, foliage and fabric hold up surprisingly well at that setting. If you notice smoothing in a key image, nudge quality to 70. Pair it with Resize HEIC so you’re not shipping 4032-pixel images to a 1200-pixel layout; that alone often matters more than the format.
Your photos stay put
The AV1 encoder runs inside your browser tab, so the slow part happens on your hardware rather than ours. That’s a deliberate trade: no queue, no upload limits, no copy of your photos on someone’s server. And because no metadata is written to AVIF, published images leak nothing about where or when they were taken.