AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. It was developed by the Alliance for Open Media—a coalition that includes Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and other major tech companies—and it utilizes the same compression technology as the AV1 video codec.
At an equivalent level of visual quality, AVIF files are typically 50% to 70% smaller than JPGs and 30% to 50% smaller than WebP files. For websites and applications that display large volumes of images, this offers a significant advantage in terms of bandwidth and loading times. This is why an increasing number of cameras, mobile phones, and web services are beginning to generate AVIF files by default.
Browser support has improved significantly; Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge now render AVIF images natively. However, browser support is only part of the story.
The broader ecosystem has yet to fully catch up with this shift. Adobe Photoshop only added support for AVIF relatively recently. Many older versions of Photoshop, Lightroom, and other professional image editors still cannot open AVIF files without a plugin. Windows Photo Viewer does not offer native support for AVIF across all systems. Furthermore, most content management systems, form managers, and web platforms have yet to update their lists of accepted file types to include AVIF. Print services, stock image platforms, and email clients still largely require JPG or PNG files.
As long as AVIF support is not truly universal across all the tools, platforms, and services one might use, having a fast and reliable way to convert AVIF to JPG remains genuinely useful for photographers, designers, developers, and everyday users. For a fuller explanation, read what AVIF is and where it comes from.