What Is AVIF? Next-Gen Image Format Explained

AVIF uses the intra-frame compression from the AV1 video codec, developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia)- A consortium including Google, Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Netflix. AV1 is royalty-free, which makes AVIF freely implementable without licensing fees, unlike some other modern codecs.

AVIF typically produces files 20–50% smaller than JPEG and 10–20% smaller than WebP at the same perceived quality. The gains are most pronounced at lower quality settings. AVIF also avoids the blocking artefacts characteristic of JPEG at high compression ratios.

AVIF natively supports 10-bit and 12-bit colour depth and HDR transfer functions (HLG, PQ), making it one of the few web-ready formats that can represent HDR content without hacks. This is relevant for displays that support P3 or Rec.2020 colour gamuts.

AVIF encoding is significantly slower than WebP or JPEG- Sometimes 10–50× slower at the same quality level, depending on the encoder settings and image resolution. This is why AVIF output on jpg.now is marked experimental and may take longer than other format conversions. Decoding speed is fast and comparable to JPEG.