Please consider adding AVIF as an image export format. It’s an ideal choice for web images, and I’d prefer to save directly from Acorn rather than relying on other applications. This would greatly simplify my workflow.
Hello @michael,
AVIF support is on the todo list. I don’t have a timeline yet, but it’s something I’d personally like to see as well.
Seconded! Glad to hear it’s on the to-do list.
Hello!
AVIF export is now available in the Acorn 8.4 betas, which you can grab from here: https://flyingmeat.com/download/latest/
Note: AVIF export requires macOS 26 or later, as that’s when Apple included support for writing AVIF files.
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dang, I’m still on Sonoma … and that’s on the newest Mac … 
Do you have avifenc installed anywhere on your system?
I had considered bundling that with Acorn, but it added 16MB to the app, and … that’s a bit much. But I suppose if you’ve got avifenc installed somewhere, I could look for that and use it. (Just spitballing here).
And if you do have it installed, where is it located?
As it happens, yes I do have avifenc1.3.0 installed, except on my oldest iMac, as /usr/local/bin/avifenc via Homebrew’s “libavif” package/formula.
Checking for /opt/homebrew/bin/avifenc and /usr/local/bin/avifenc would cover both of the default Homebrew install locations for Apple Silicon and Intel (or Rosetta 2), respectively. Or you could include a config box for the user to enter a path or browse to the executable?
The latest version of Acorn now supports looking for avifenc. From the release notes:
- You can now export images in the AVIF format, via the File ▸ Export ▸ Export (Web & Other)menu. In general, this only available for macOS 26 or later. However if you have the
avifenctool installed, Acorn will detect this and use it for encoding of AVIF files. It currently looks in both/opt/homebrew/bin/and/usr/local/bin/. Alternatively you can also set theavifencPathdefault with a full path to the encoder you’d like to use.
You can grab it from https://flyingmeat.com/download/latest/
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Great that images can now be exported to the AVIF format. For me on macOS 26.2, Acorn crashes after selecting AVIF if libavif is installed. If I uninstall libavif, Acorn doesn’t crash and I can export the image.
Well that’s certainly no good!
Can you send in a crash report to support@flyingmeat.com? Or use the built in feedback reporter if it comes up? I’m not seeing any crash reports at the moment for 8.4
Nice having AVIF as an option now in “Export (Web & Other)”. Thanks Gus!
Needs to be added to the /acorn/docs-8.0/export___web_export.html page when time allows!
I’ve never played with it before, but results are interesting - with “Lossless” selected, AVIF filesize is markedly bigger than WEBP, but once you start using lossy compression, it’s miles ahead of everything, even WEBP.
Does exporting as AVIF always cause this message to be displayed at the bottom of the window?
“For the image to display correctly, a color profile may need to be embedded.”
Do you suggest this because AVIF support in some other software may not be very good?
That warning will come up when the original profile wasn’t embedded in the exported image, and the default one (sRGB) doesn’t match the original.
If you change the profile to sRGB and click the “match colors to profile” option, then this warning will be meaningless (and I should add a check for that case - thanks for bringing this to my attention).
By default on macOS (and pretty much every OS or browser at this point as far as I’m aware), if an image doesn’t have a profile embedded in it then sRGB will be used. So if you want to save on file size, then you can convert your original image to sRGB (and match colors so it won’t look muted), and save some bytes by not embedding the profile in the image.
However, if your image is something like DP3 and uses colors outside of sRGB’s range, you’ll want to embed the profile.
Does that make sense? Color profiles can be difficult to explain sometimes.
Hi Gus,
Yes, that absolutely makes sense. I did, in this instance, have “Match colors to profile” set. So if you’ll add a check for that option and suppress the color profile embedding suggestion, that will be great - thanks.
I hope support for AVIF via macOS 26+ or external avifenc will make it to Retrobatch too, please?
It’s on the todo list for sure!
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