Convert HEIC to AVIF Online

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.

AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) was finalised in February 2019 by the Alliance for Open Media — a consortium including Google, Netflix, Amazon and Mozilla. It wraps a still frame of AV1 video in an ISO base media container — structurally the same HEIF container family HEIC uses, but with a royalty-free codec instead of patent-encumbered HEVC. AVIF matches or beats HEIC at low bitrates and, crucially, is displayed by Chrome (2020), Firefox (2021) and Safari (2022), whereas HEIC never escaped the Apple ecosystem. That makes HEIC to AVIF the natural bridge from iPhone capture to modern web delivery.

AVIF is the most efficient image format with broad browser support - And unlike HEIC, browsers actually render it. Converting iPhone HEIC photos to AVIF keeps the small-file advantage you are used to while making the image displayable in Chrome 85+, Firefox 93+, Edge 121+, and Safari 16.4+ without any plugin or server-side trickery.

For web developers, this is the highest-impact way to publish iPhone photography: AVIF files are typically as small as or smaller than the HEIC originals, which means no bandwidth penalty for making the content web-compatible. Photo-heavy blogs, portfolios, and e-commerce catalogues benefit most.

For maximum compatibility, serve AVIF through an HTML <picture> element with a JPG fallback. Supported browsers get the smallest file; legacy browsers still see the image. heic.now can produce both outputs from the same HEIC source in two quick conversions.