What's the actual difference between HEIC and AVIF?

AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is HEIC's closest cousin: both are HEIF-family containers, but AVIF uses the royalty-free AV1 codec where HEIC uses HEVC/H.265. The practical difference is where they work. HEIC lives inside the Apple ecosystem and no web browser will render it; AVIF is a first-class web format with 90%+ browser support, covering Chrome 85+, Firefox 93+, Edge 121+, and Safari 16+.

Converting HEIC to AVIF is therefore mostly about web publishing: it turns iPhone captures into files a browser can actually display while keeping - Or even improving - The excellent compression efficiency. Both formats support 10-bit colour and HDR, so the depth of modern iPhone captures survives the conversion rather than being flattened as it would be in a JPG.

The trade-off is encoding time. AVIF encoding is computationally intensive - Typically 5–30× slower than JPEG encoding. For online conversion of individual images this is barely noticeable, but large batches take longer than other targets. AVIF is also not yet supported in most email clients and some older software, so keep a JPG fallback for those audiences.

Reasons to convert HEIC to AVIF usually come down to compatibility, file-size, or specific feature requirements. Common situations:

• An app or platform only accepts AVIF uploads.
• You need a feature unique to AVIF (e.g. transparency, vector scaling, animation, multi-page pages, etc.) that HEIC doesn't provide.
• You're optimising file size — modern formats often produce smaller files than the older format you started with.
• You need a single archival format across a project so files behave consistently in the same viewer.

1. Open the HEIC → AVIF tool on heic.now.
2. Drag your HEIC file onto the drop zone, or click Select files. You can drop a whole folder of files at once.
3. The output is fixed to AVIF. If the format supports extra options (page size, transparency background, quality, EXIF stripping), tweak them in the right-hand panel.
4. Click Convert. The job runs on our server and finishes in a few seconds for typical photos.
5. Download the result. Files stay in storage for 24 hours and are then permanently deleted.

The entire flow is free for the first 10 jobs per day with no signup required. A free account doubles that quota; a premium plan removes the limit entirely.

• Use AVIF for hero images and large photographs on modern websites - It offers the best compression-to-quality ratio of any browser-supported format.
• Pair AVIF with a JPG fallback in the HTML element for maximum compatibility: browsers that don't support AVIF will use the JPG automatically.
• Target quality 60–75% for AVIF - Its encoder is efficient enough that this range visually matches much higher settings in older formats.
• AVIF encoding is slower than other formats - Expect slightly longer conversion times for large images.
• Keep the original HEIC as your master file - Both formats are lossy, so re-encoding always costs a little quality.