AVIF Image

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) developed the AVIF format. AOMedia is a non-profit consortium formed in 2015 by companies including Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix.

The group created the AV1 video codec and later applied the same compression technology to images stored in the HEIF container. This approach enables AVIF to deliver high-quality images at smaller sizes than many traditional formats.

AVIF supports lossless and lossy compression, high dynamic range ( HDR ) images, monochrome images, and color depths up to 12 bits. The format can also store animations, similar to .GIF files, by including multiple frames and timing information within a single file. Because of these capabilities, AVIF has gained adoption in web browsers, mobile operating systems, and media applications.

You can open AVIF files with most modern web browsers, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox , and in applications that support the format, such as recent versions of Adobe Photoshop , GIMP (with plugins), Windows apps with the AV1 and HEIF extensions installed, and various third-party image viewers. Advanced users can also use the open-source libavif library to encode and decode AVIF images.

With both the AV1 Video Extension and HEIF Image Extensions installed, Windows users can use Microsoft Paint to open AVIF images and convert them to the following formats:

Mac users can use Apple Preview to quickly convert AVIF images to the JPG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC, .PDF , .EXR , and .JP2 formats.

Programs that open AVIF files

Updated: December 9, 2025