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Definition
AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is a modern image format based on the AV1 video codec. It delivers significantly smaller files than JPEG and WebP at the same visual quality, and supports features like HDR, wide color gamut, and transparency.
AVIF emerged from the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) — a consortium including Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix. It applies the AV1 video codec's compression to still images, achieving file sizes roughly 50% smaller than JPEG and 20% smaller than WebP at equivalent quality levels.
Browser support for AVIF has grown rapidly. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all support AVIF as of 2023. The format handles both lossy and lossless compression, supports transparency (alpha channel), HDR content, and wide color gamuts — making it suitable for everything from web thumbnails to professional photography.
The main drawback of AVIF is encoding speed. Compressing an image to AVIF takes significantly longer than JPEG or WebP encoding, which can be a bottleneck in automated pipelines. Decoding (viewing) speed is fast in modern browsers. For web developers, AVIF is increasingly the recommended next-generation format alongside WebP as a fallback.