For the last few weeks I have been playing around with different image formats while creating a tool for batch image conversion. It is surprising to see the level of compression that some of these new formats are capable of.
AVIF images in particular are unbelievably small when compared to PNG and JPEG files.
The screenshot below shows wallpapers in JPG/PNG format
after conversion to AVIF. These are the default wallpapers included with Ubuntu 24.04
and located in the directory /usr/share/backgrounds.
See the highlighted image below? That’s a 6.3 MB wallpaper, compressed into a file of size 72 KB.
The default Ubuntu Noble wallpaper weighs in at 5.9 MB and compresses to just 12 KB.
Looking at these sizes may make you think that there was some error in the conversion and that the output file is corrupt, but that’s not the case.
Ubuntu supports setting AVIF images as desktop wallpaper. I set the AVIF image as the wallpaper on a 4K screen and could not spot any differences compared to the original image.
This screenshot itself is a 147 KB PNG that compresses to a 9 KB AVIF image.