AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an

image file format An Image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, Portable Network Graphics, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an ...

specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with

AV1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 th ...

in the

HEIF High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences. The standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video. HEI ...

container format. It competes with

HEIC High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences. The standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video. HEIF ...

, which uses the same container format built upon

ISOBMFF The ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) is a container file format that defines a general structure for files that contain time-based multimedia data such as video and audio. It is standardized in ISO/IEC 14496-12, a.k.a. MPEG-4 Part 12, and was ...

, but

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compari ...

for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019. In a number of tests by

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...

in 2020, AVIF showed better compression efficiency than

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

as well as better detail preservation, fewer blocking artifacts and less color bleeding around hard edges in composites of natural

image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

, and

graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture ...

Features

AVIF supports features like: * Multiple

color space A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of colorwhether such representation entails an analog or a digital represent ...

, including: ** HDR (with PQ or HLG transfer functions and

BT.2020 ITU-R Recommendation BT.2020, more commonly known by the abbreviations Rec. 2020 or BT.2020, defines various aspects of ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) with standard dynamic range (SDR) and wide color gamut (WCG), including picture ...

color primaries, as part of BT.2100) ** SDR (with

sRGB sRGB is a standard RGB (red, green, blue) color space that HP and Microsoft created cooperatively in 1996 to use on monitors, printers, and the World Wide Web. It was subsequently standardized by the International Electrotechnical Commission ( ...

BT.709 Rec. 709, also known as Rec.709, BT.709, and ITU 709, is a standard developed by ITU-R for image encoding and signal characteristics of high-definition television. The most recent version is BT.709-6 released in 2015. BT.709-6 defines the P ...

/ BT.601 or with

wide color gamut In color reproduction, including computer graphics and photography, the gamut, or color gamut , is a certain ''complete subset'' of colors. The most common usage refers to the subset of colors which can be accurately represented in a given cir ...

) ** Color space signaling via CICP (ITU-T H.273 and ISO/IEC 23091-2) or

ICC profile In color management, an ICC profile is a set of data that characterizes a color input or output device, or a color space, according to standards promulgated by the International Color Consortium (ICC). Profiles describe the color attributes of a ...

s *

Lossless compression Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...

and

lossy compression In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...

* 8-, 10-, and 12-bit

color depth Color depth or colour depth (see spelling differences), also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to ...

s * Monochrome (alpha/depth) or multi-components * 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4

chroma subsampling Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance. It is us ...

and RGB *

Film grain Film grain or granularity is the random optical texture of processed photographic film due to the presence of small particles of a metallic silver, or dye clouds, developed from silver halide that have received enough photons. While film grain ...

* Image sequences/animation

Profiles

AVIF specification defines two image profiles: * AVIF Baseline Profile ** Uses AV1 Main Profile ** AV1 level is 5.1 or lower *** ''Level 5.1 is chosen for the Baseline profile to ensure that no single coded image exceeds 8K resolution, as some decoders may not be able to handle larger images. More precisely, coded image items compliant to the AVIF Baseline profile may not have a total number of pixels greater than 8912896, a width greater than 8192, or a height greater than 4352. It is still possible to use the Baseline profile to create larger images using grid derivation.'' * AVIF Advanced Profile ** Uses AV1 High Profile ** AV1 level is 6.0 or lower *** ''Coded image items compliant to the AVIF Advanced profile may not have a total number of pixels greater than 35651584, a width greater than 16384, or a height greater than 8704. It is still possible to use the Advanced profile to create larger images using grid derivation.''

Support

On 14 December 2018

published the first .avif sample images. In November 2020, HDR sample images with PQ transfer function and BT.2020 color primaries were published.

Software

*Encoder: wavif, written by Cédric Louvrier, French developer that wrote the Pingo webp Image Optimizer, a multi format tool for optimized images. Closed source license but free to use for public projects. Version 0.17 released on 01 December 2022. The encoder is still at early stage and outputs big sizes such as 1:9 compression ratio. It has an only command line tool and uses the libaom wrapper at q 92 webp equivalent.

Web browsers

* In August 2020,

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...

version 85 was released with full AVIF support. Google Chrome 89 for Android adds AVIF support. * In October 2021,

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

93 was released with default AVIF support. It had planned to enable AVIF support by default in Firefox 86, but pulled the change a day before release. *

WebKit WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as on the iOS and iPadOS version of any web browser. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the PS ...

added AVIF support on 5 March 2021. Safari for iOS 16 has added the support for AVIF, iOS 16 was released on September 12, 2022. macOS Ventura has added AVIF support and Safari on macOS Ventura has added AVIF support macOS Ventura was released on October 24, 2022.

Image viewers

XnView XnView is an image organizer and general-purpose file manager used for viewing, converting, organizing and editing raster images, as well as general purpose file management. It comes with built-in hex inspection, batch renaming and screen cap ...

gThumb gThumb is a free and open-source image viewer and image organizer with options to edit images. It is designed to have a clean and simple user interface and follows GNOME HIG, it integrates well with the GNOME desktop environment. Features ...

Eye of GNOME Eye of GNOME is the official and default image viewer for the GNOME desktop environment, where it is also known as Image Viewer. There is also another official image viewer for GNOME called gThumb that has more advanced features like image org ...

Loupe A loupe ( ) is a simple, small magnification device used to see small details more closely. They generally have higher magnification than a magnifying glass, and are designed to be held or worn close to the eye. A loupe does not have an attached h ...

ImageMagick ImageMagick, invoked from the command line as magick, is a free and open-source cross-platform software suite for displaying, creating, converting, modifying, and editing raster images. Created in 1987 by John Cristy, it can read and write ove ...

IrfanView IrfanView () is an image viewer, editor, organiser and converter program for Microsoft Windows. It can also play video and audio files, and has some image creation and painting capabilities. IrfanView is free for non-commercial use; commercial u ...

(read only) *

Gwenview Gwenview is an image viewer for Unix-like systems (including Linux) and is released as part of the KDE Applications bundle. The current maintainer is Aurélien Gâteau. The word "Gwen" means "white" in the Breton language and is commonly used as ...

* digiKam 7.7.0 * Apple Photos app on the iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS 13.

Media player

* VLC reads AVIF files starting with version 4, which is still in development

Image editors

Paint.net Paint.net (stylized as Paint.NET or paint.net) is a freeware raster graphics editor program for Microsoft Windows, developed on the .NET Framework. Paint.net was originally created by Rick Brewster as a Washington State University student project, ...

added support for opening AVIF files in September 2019, and the ability to save AVIF format images in an August 2020 update. * The Colorist format conversion and

Darktable Darktable (stylized as darktable) is a free and open-source photography application program and raw developer. Rather than being a raster graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, it comprises a subset of image editing operations specifical ...

RAW image data have each released support for and provide reference implementations of libavif. * A

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized task ...

plugin implementation has been developed supporting both 3.x and 2.10.x plugin APIs. Native AVIF import and export was added to GIMP in October 2020. *

Krita Krita ( ) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital art and 2D animation. The software runs on Windows, macOS, Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on th ...

5.0 released on 23 December 2021 added AVIF support. The support also includes Rec.2100 HDR AVIF images. *

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

May 2022 release released on May 10 2022 added AVIF support. * Pixelmator Pro 3.1 released on November 2, 2022 added initial AVIF support.

Image libraries

libavif
– portable library for encoding and decoding AVIF files.
libheif
– ISO/IEC 23008-12:2017

and AVIF decoder and encoder.
SAIL
– format-agnostic library with support of AVIF implemented on top of libavif. *

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

Operating systems

* Windows -

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

announced support with the

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

" 19H1" preview release, including support in File Explorer, Paint and multiple APIs, together with sample images. * Android - Android 12, released on 4 October 2021, added native support for AVIF, although it will not be the default image format for the camera app. * GNU/Linux - AVIF is widely supported in

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s. With the release of libavif 0.8.0 in July 2020, which added a GdkPixbuf plugin, AVIF support is present in most GNOME/GTK applications. The

KDE Frameworks KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, fi ...

added support for AVIF to the "KImageFormats" library in January 2021, enabling most KDE/Qt applications to support viewing and saving AVIF images. * Apple Platforms - iOS 16, iPadOS 16,

macOS Ventura macOS Ventura (version 13) is the nineteenth and current major release of macOS, Apple's desktop operating system for Mac computers. The successor to macOS Monterey, it was announced at WWDC 2022 on June 6, 2022, and launched on October 24, 2 ...

have AVIF image support. You can directly store and view AVIF photos in the Photos and Files app, etc.

Websites

* On 14 February 2020,

published a blog article with objective measurements on AVIF's image quality and compression efficiency in comparison to

. *

Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in San ...

announced AVIF support in a blog post on 3 October 2020. *

Vimeo Vimeo, Inc. () is an American video hosting, sharing, and services platform provider headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo's business model is through software as ...

announced AVIF support in a blog post on 3 June 2021.

Programming languages

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

has AVIF support in its GD extension since PHP version 8.1.

Others

Exiftool ExifTool is a free and open-source software program for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, video, and PDF metadata. It is platform independent, available as both a Perl library (Image::ExifTool) and command-line application. Exi ...

has supported AVIF format for reading and writing EXIF since v11.79.

References

{{Compression formats Animated graphics file formats Raster graphics file formats 2019 introductions