JPG to AVIF: Cut Photo File Sizes by Half

A page of twelve product photos at 400 KB each is 4.8 MB of images. Convert those JPGs to AVIF and the same page typically drops to somewhere between 2.4 and 3.4 MB, with nothing anyone would notice at normal viewing size. That's the pitch, and it holds up.

What AVIF is, in one paragraph

AVIF is built on AV1, the royalty-free video codec that Netflix and YouTube stream with. An AVIF image is essentially a single frame of AV1 video in an image wrapper. Video compression has had far more money poured into it than still image compression ever did, and AVIF inherits all of it: files 30 to 50 percent smaller than JPEG at matching quality, transparency support that JPEG never had, and display support in roughly 92 percent or more of browsers in use, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari 16 and up. Our complete guide to AVIF covers the technical side properly.

How to convert JPG to AVIF

1. Open the AVIF Converter.
2. Drop your JPGs in, up to 30 MB each, as many as you like.
3. Leave quality at 50 unless you have a reason not to. AVIF's scale doesn't match JPEG's, and 50 on AVIF looks like something in the high 70s on JPEG.
4. Skip the Lossless toggle for photographs. It produces much larger files and buys you nothing you can see.
5. Convert, then download individually or as a ZIP.

The catch when your source is a JPG

Your JPEG already threw detail away once. Converting to AVIF decodes what survived and compresses it again, so you're squeezing something that's already been squeezed.

In practice this works fine, and it's what most people are doing. But two things follow from it. Don't drop the quality slider below 40 on a JPEG that was already saved at low quality, or you'll be compressing compression artifacts and they'll harden into visible blocks. And if you happen to have the original camera file or a PNG export, convert from that instead. You'll get a cleaner AVIF at a smaller size.

Two more things worth knowing

Encoding is slow. Noticeably slower than JPEG or WebP, because AV1 was built to compress hard rather than fast. Twenty images is nothing. Two thousand on a laptop is an evening. On big batches, WebP gets most of the way there in a fraction of the time.

This works in every browser. Chrome and Edge can create AVIF through the browser's built in Canvas API, but Firefox and Safari cannot, which is why some online converters mysteriously fail for half their users. ZeroPNG runs libavif compiled to WebAssembly instead, so the same encoder produces the same output no matter what you're browsing in. Nothing is uploaded either way.

Keep the JPG

Don't delete the source. Use both: list the AVIF first in a picture element and the JPG as the fallback, and each browser downloads only the one it can read. That covers the remaining sliver of devices without making anyone else pay for it. Our guide on converting images to AVIF has the markup and the four situations where you should pick a different format entirely.