Running a Food Blog Means Taking 200 iPhone Photos a Week — This Is How I Deal With Them

Every recipe on my food blog needs 8–12 step photos and a final dish shot. All taken on my iPhone 14, all saved as HEIC. My old workflow was HEIC → JPG → upload. The JPGs were fine but my Core Web Vitals were mediocre. A friend who does web performance work pointed me toward AVIF. Converting directly from HEIC to AVIF — skipping the JPG step entirely — cut my average photo file size from about 650KB to 210KB. My Lighthouse score on recipe pages went from 61 to 84. And I'm doing fewer conversion steps, not more.

AV1-based compression — smaller than both HEIC and JPG for web delivery
Browser-based conversion on any device — no app required
Temporary processing only — files auto-deleted after conversion completes

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Why the old workflow had one step too many

The HEIC → JPG → AVIF chain introduces unnecessary quality loss. When you convert HEIC to JPG, you're decoding the HEIC (which already used lossy compression) and then re-encoding those pixels to JPG (another lossy step). Then converting that JPG to AVIF is a third compression step on top. Going directly HEIC → AVIF is one decode and one encode. The AVIF encoder works with the cleanest possible pixel data from the HEIC, and the output is both smaller and cleaner than the triple-step route.

Plomz HEIC to AVIF converter with a batch of food blog iPhone photos loaded for conversion — A week's worth of food blog photos converting from HEIC to AVIF — average file size 210KB, down from 650KB as JPG.

What I learned from tracking file sizes over three months

I kept a spreadsheet for three months comparing HEIC, JPG, and AVIF sizes for the same photos. My averages across food photography (close-ups, overhead shots, step-by-step prep photos):

Original HEIC: 3.2MB average (straight from camera, full resolution)
After resizing to 1200px: HEIC equivalent would be ~900KB, JPG at quality 85 was ~650KB
AVIF at quality 65: ~210KB — visually identical to the JPG on screen
AVIF at quality 75: ~280KB — noticeable quality improvement for close-up texture shots

I settled on quality 70 for most photos and quality 75 for any shot where fine food texture (bread crumb, cake layers, cheese pull) is the visual focus. That's my workflow now.

AVIF and HDR photos from iPhone

iPhone photos taken in HDR mode contain richer color and tonal range than standard shots. AVIF natively supports wide color gamuts (Display P3) and 10-bit color depth. This means iPhone HDR photos can be encoded to AVIF without downgrading the color information — the full tonal range is preserved, and on HDR-capable displays, the photos will look as vivid as they did on your iPhone screen.

JPG doesn't support this — it's limited to 8-bit sRGB. Converting HEIC HDR photos to JPG downgrades the color information. Converting to AVIF preserves it.

When AVIF isn't the right choice

Email: Email clients don't support AVIF. Use JPG for anything going by email — sharing photos with family, newsletters, client deliverables via email.
Sharing with non-web contexts: If someone is going to open the file in Photoshop, Windows Photo Viewer, or print from it, JPG or PNG is safer than AVIF.
Archival: For long-term storage, keep the original HEIC or convert to PNG. AVIF is a delivery format.
Older browsers: Serve a JPG or WebP fallback for users on older Safari (before 16.4) using the HTML <picture> element.

Photos processed privately — deleted on completion

Your HEIC files are uploaded over HTTPS and processed in temporary storage. Both the uploaded HEIC and the generated AVIF are deleted automatically when the conversion finishes. No account needed, no data retained.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will AVIF look the same as my original HEIC photo?

At high quality settings, yes — both formats use perceptual compression at comparable efficiency. The AVIF may actually be slightly smaller than the HEIC at equivalent quality for web-optimized output.

Does AVIF support the wide color (Display P3) from iPhone photos?

Yes. AVIF natively supports wide color gamuts and 10-bit color depth. iPhone photos in Display P3 can be encoded to AVIF without color space downconversion, preserving the full color range for HDR-capable displays.

Is AVIF supported by all browsers?

Chrome (85+), Firefox (93+), Safari (16.4+), and Edge (121+) support AVIF. Serve a JPG or WebP fallback for older browsers using the HTML <picture> element.