As a photographer, I am always interested in new image formats, whether WebP or now AVIF. The ultimate goal of any image format should be to preserve quality. It seems that all previous attempts to replace jpegs have failed. I don’t see why this would be any different, but I am open to giving it a shot.

Cloudflare made a nice comparison here.

Sadly some of their AVIF photos would not even load on my Chrome browser, so I tried again on Firefox without much luck. Looking at their detail section, I can clearly see a difference between JPEG compression and AVIF compression.

I will be using Lightroom to export the JPEGs to make this comparison. I think we can agree that most photographers would be using Lightroom, Photoshop, CaptureOne, Gimp, or some commercially available photography program. I may be wrong, but I doubt most photographers would use an app such as https://squoosh.app/

I will be using Squoosh to export to AVIF. Squoosh is an experimental project from the Google Chrome Labs team and claimes to “Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs.” It is also the only app I could find with a graphic interface to compress JPGs to AVIF.

The above image is 1.56 MB and LR Export settings are 80% Quality and 2500 x 1667

WordPress does not allow this type of file.

Sadly I was unable to use the photo on WordPress 5.9 the most up-to-date version as of February 2022, so I tried to upload it to Flickr and it also did not support the AVIF format. I will be stopping the test here, but want to point out that image format has the same flaws as most other formats and that is widespread acceptance.