WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN...
AVIF and older image types
Q I recently found a photo online that I wanted to keep, so I right-clicked to save a copy of it. It saved in a format I’d never seen before – AVIF, with the file extension ‘.avif’. All my browsers can open this file, as can Google Photos. However, Microsoft Paint and other apps don’t recognise it. My online research told me that AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format, and that it’s designed for highly efficient compression and quality. From what I read, it was designed to replace legacy formats such as JPEG and WebP. This is what prompted me to write to you. Is this true? What are the implications? And is there any real difference?