AVIF Support in ImageMagick and Image Tools

This article explores the current state of AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) support across popular image manipulation tools, with a primary focus on ImageMagick. It details how these utilities leverage the reference library, libavif, to enable reading, writing, and converting this highly efficient next-generation image format, while also reviewing support in other major tools like GIMP, Sharp, and libvips.

ImageMagick Support for libavif

ImageMagick provides robust, production-ready support for the AVIF format. This compatibility is achieved by compiling ImageMagick with the libavif delegate library (or occasionally libheif with AVIF enabled).

Verification of Support

To check if your local installation of ImageMagick supports AVIF, run the following command in your terminal:

magick identify -list format | grep -i avif

Or for older versions:

convert -list format | grep -i avif

If supported, the output will list AVIF with read/write permissions (indicated by rw+ or similar flags).

Read and Write Operations

With libavif integrated, ImageMagick can convert standard images (like JPEG or PNG) to AVIF, and vice versa, using standard commands:

magick input.png output.avif

Advanced Encoding Controls

ImageMagick exposes several configuration parameters to fine-tune the AVIF encoding process via the libavif delegate. These can be adjusted using the -quality flag and specific -define options:

• Compression Quality: The -quality flag maps to the quantizer values in libavif. A quality of 100 translates to lossless encoding, while lower values increase compression.

• Encoding Speed: You can control the CPU effort versus file size trade-off using the speed setting (typically on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is the fastest but least efficient):

  magick input.jpg -define heic:speed=6 output.avif

Support in Other Popular Image Tools

Beyond ImageMagick, libavif has been widely adopted across the open-source and proprietary image manipulation ecosystem.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)

GIMP introduced native AVIF support in version 2.10.22. It relies on libgegl and libavif to allow users to import and export AVIF files. Upon exporting, GIMP provides a graphical dialog box where users can configure lossless toggles, adjust compression quality, select chroma subsampling (e.g., 4:2:0, 4:4:4), and manage color profiles.

Sharp (Node.js) and libvips

For web developers, Sharp is the leading high-performance Node.js image processing library. Under the hood, Sharp uses the libvips image processing library. * libvips: Native AVIF support is compiled via libavif or libheif. * Sharp: Fully supports AVIF out of the box in modern versions. Developers can programmatically control effort (speed), quality, chroma subsampling, and lossless configurations directly in their JavaScript pipelines.

Adobe Photoshop

While historically reliant on third-party community plugins to handle AVIF files, Adobe Photoshop now includes native read and write support for AVIF in its recent versions. However, Photoshop’s automation capabilities for bulk AVIF processing remain less flexible compared to command-line utilities like ImageMagick.