Convert AVIF to JPG on Mac

AVIF support arrived at the system level in macOS 13 Ventura, released in 2022. From Ventura onward, Preview, Quick Look, Photos, and the Finder thumbnail engine all understand AVIF without any additional software. You can double-click an AVIF file and it opens; you can hit spacebar in Finder and Quick Look shows it; the Photos app accepts it for import.

On macOS 12 Monterey and earlier — including Big Sur, Catalina, and older releases — the system has no AVIF decoder. Preview shows an error. Quick Look displays a generic document icon. Photos refuses to import the file. The constraint is at the operating system level, not in any specific app, so updating one app does not fix it. The only system-level fix is upgrading to Ventura or later.

If your Mac cannot run Ventura (Apple dropped a number of Intel machines from the Ventura upgrade list), the practical options are a browser-based converter, or a command-line tool installed through Homebrew. Both are covered below. The AVIF to JPG converter on this page works in any modern browser, including browsers that run on Monterey and Big Sur, because browser AVIF support is independent of the operating system's own image decoder.

Preview is the cleanest path when you need to convert one or a handful of AVIF files to JPG on a Mac running Ventura or later. No extra software, no command line.

• Open the file. Double-click the AVIF in Finder, or right-click and choose Open With → Preview. On Ventura the image appears immediately.
• Export as JPEG. In the menu bar, choose File → Export… (not “Export as PDF”). In the dialog that appears, click the Format dropdown and select JPEG.
• Set quality. A Quality slider appears below the format picker. Dragging it toward Best produces a larger JPG with finer detail; dragging toward Least produces a smaller file with visible compression. For most photographs, a setting around 80–85% out of 100 gives a compact file that looks sharp on screen and in print.
• Choose a destination and save. Pick the folder, optionally rename the file, then click Save. Preview writes the JPG and closes the dialog; the AVIF source is unchanged.

One limitation worth knowing: Preview's Export dialog converts one file at a time. If you have twenty AVIF files to convert, Preview is tedious. For a batch job, the sips command or the browser tool below are more efficient.

There is no “Export All” shortcut in Preview, but the app does support opening multiple files at once. When multiple images are open in a single Preview window (visible as a sidebar), you can select them all and choose Export Selected Images from the File menu. Preview will ask for a destination folder and write every selected image as JPEG, keeping the quality setting you last used. This is slower than a script but faster than repeating the export dialog for each file.

Every Mac ships with a command-line tool called sips (Scriptable Image Processing System). It has been part of macOS since the early Intel era, and on modern macOS it reads AVIF natively. No Homebrew, no installs.

To convert a single file, open Terminal and run:

sips -s format jpeg input.avif --out output.jpg

The -s format jpeg flag tells sips to re-encode as JPEG. The --out flag specifies the output path. The source file is not modified.

To convert an entire folder of AVIF files to JPG in one go:

for f in ~/Pictures/*.avif; do
  sips -s format jpeg "$f" --out "${f%.avif}.jpg"
done

Replace ~/Pictures/ with the actual folder path. The shell expansion ${f%.avif} strips the .avif extension before appending .jpg, so photo.avif becomes photo.jpg without manual renaming.

A note on older macOS: sips exists on Monterey and earlier, but it does not understand AVIF on those systems. Running the command on a Mac without system-level AVIF support produces an error. On Ventura and later it works without any configuration.

The default JPEG quality sips produces is reasonable for most uses. If you need explicit quality control, sips accepts -s formatOptions followed by a number from 0 to 100:

sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 85 input.avif --out output.jpg

If the AVIF files you want to convert are already imported into the macOS Photos app, the export path through Photos is convenient and does not require Terminal.

• Import the AVIF (if not already in the library). On Ventura and later, drag the AVIF file into Photos or use File → Import. Photos decodes it and adds it to the library. On Monterey and earlier, Photos will not accept AVIF.
• Select the photos you want to export. Click one photo to select it, or hold Command and click multiple photos to select a batch.
• Choose File → Export → Export Photos. A dialog appears with format, quality, and filename options.
• Set format to JPEG. The Photo Kind dropdown defaults to “JPEG” for most images. Leave it there. The Quality slider controls compression; “High” or “Maximum” is appropriate for images you plan to edit or print further.
• Click Export and pick a destination folder. Photos writes one JPG per selected image. The originals remain in the library untouched.

Photos is particularly handy for images shot by an iPhone or iPad, since those arrive in the library automatically when iCloud Photos is enabled. The HEIC-vs-AVIF distinction is worth mentioning here: iPhone cameras shoot HEIC by default, not AVIF. If you opened a file from the web or received it from a collaborator and it ends in .avif, it is AVIF. If it came from an iPhone Camera Roll and ends in .heic, it is HEIC. The two formats look similar in a file listing but are handled differently — do not rename a .heic file to .avif expecting it to work as one.

When the operating system itself cannot decode AVIF, native tools — Preview, Photos, Quick Look, sips — all fail because they share the same system-level decoder. The file is opaque to the OS. There are two practical paths that do not require an OS upgrade.

The browser route is the easiest. Modern browsers maintain their own AVIF decoder independent of the OS. Chrome has decoded AVIF since version 85, and Firefox since version 93. If either is installed on your Monterey machine, the browser-based AVIF to JPG converter uses that built-in decoder to read your file locally and re-encode it as JPG, without uploading anything. No permissions, no admin rights, nothing to install.

The Homebrew route is for users comfortable with Terminal who need batch processing in a script. Installing Homebrew, then ImageMagick or ffmpeg, gives you a command-line AVIF decoder that does not depend on the OS:

brew install imagemagick
magick input.avif output.jpg

Or with ffmpeg:

brew install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -i input.avif output.jpg

On company-managed Macs, Homebrew is often blocked by the IT policy. That is exactly the scenario where the browser converter is the right choice: it requires no installation, no admin privileges, and nothing that a typical MDM profile would restrict. Every file stays local — nothing is sent to a server.

Converting a single file takes seconds by any method. Converting thirty or three hundred requires a different approach. Here is how the options compare for batch work.

• sips loop in Terminal (Ventura+, free, scriptable). A one-line shell loop converts an entire folder with no third-party software. Quality is controlled with -s formatOptions. Output filenames mirror input names automatically. Best for users already comfortable in Terminal who want the conversion embedded in a larger script or build step.
• Preview “Export Selected Images” (Ventura+, no Terminal). Open multiple AVIF files in one Preview window, select all in the sidebar, then File → Export Selected Images. Practical for a one-off batch of up to a few dozen files. Not scriptable, and the quality setting persists from your last export rather than being set per-batch.
• Browser batch queue (any macOS, no install, ZIP download, private). Drop any number of AVIF files onto the converter on this page. The queue processes files one at a time using your browser's own decoder, shows per-file status, and lets you download the complete set as a ZIP archive. Works on Monterey and earlier because the browser decoder does not rely on the OS. No installation, no admin rights required.

For very large batches on older macOS, the Homebrew + ffmpeg combination is the most flexible. A for-loop in Terminal can process hundreds of files overnight and log any errors to a file you can review afterward. The browser queue is capped by available browser memory, which on a laptop handles dozens of typical web images without difficulty but can slow on very large photographic files.

iPhone and iPad cameras default to HEIC for photos. HEIC uses the HEVC (H.265) codec inside an ISOBMFF container — the same container structure AVIF uses, which is why the two formats look similar at a glance. But the codec inside is completely different, and a tool that reads one does not necessarily read the other.

macOS has supported HEIC for a long time (it arrived alongside the iPhone feature in 2017), so Preview, Photos, and Quick Look all open HEIC without issue even on older macOS versions. AVIF arrived at the OS level much later, with Ventura in 2022. If a file from your iPhone Camera Roll shows the checkerboard “unsupported” pattern in a browser or third-party app, it is almost certainly HEIC that the specific app does not handle, not AVIF.

The practical rule: if a file came off an iPhone Camera Roll or from AirDrop from an iPhone, it is almost certainly .heic. If it came from the web, a web developer, or a modern image pipeline, it is more likely .avif. Check the file extension to be sure before choosing a conversion path, and do not rename a .heic file to .avif — renaming changes the label, not the data inside, and the renamed file will still fail wherever AVIF is expected.

Both formats convert to JPG through Preview on modern macOS with the same steps. The decoder used under the hood is different for each format, but the user-facing workflow — Open → File → Export → JPEG — is identical. See AVIF vs JPG for a deeper look at when converting is worth it versus keeping the original.

The AVIF you start with was likely encoded at a quality setting chosen by whoever produced it — a web developer optimizing page speed, a camera app, or an image processing pipeline. That encoding decision is baked in. Converting to JPG on your Mac does not give back detail the AVIF encoder discarded; it preserves whatever the decoded pixels look like and re-encodes them as JPEG.

For photographs that were encoded at typical web quality settings, the resulting JPG tends to be noticeably larger than the AVIF source, because AVIF achieves much better compression than JPEG at equivalent perceived quality. A 200 KB AVIF photo might become a 500–800 KB JPG at a quality setting of 85. That larger file is expected: you are trading AVIF's compact size for the universal compatibility of JPEG.

If you want to inspect your AVIF before converting — to see its dimensions, check whether it has an alpha channel, or just verify it is a real AVIF — the AVIF viewer opens it in any browser with no install needed.

For output quality in Preview, the slider range maps roughly as follows: values below 60 produce visible block artifacts in photographic areas; 70–80 is a good general purpose setting; 85–90 is appropriate for images that will be displayed at large sizes or printed; above 90, file size grows quickly with diminishing perceptible improvement for most images. The sips formatOptions parameter uses the same 0–100 scale.

Many professionals use macOS on a machine managed by an IT department. These machines often have policies that block installation of software from outside the App Store, prevent Homebrew from writing to /usr/local or /opt/homebrew, or require VPN for network access. Any of those policies can block the Homebrew path entirely.

The browser-based path sidesteps all of that. A browser is already installed and already trusted on every managed Mac. Loading this page and dropping files onto the converter requires no new software, no admin rights, and no IT ticket. The conversion runs in the browser tab using the browser's built-in AVIF decoder — the same decoder that renders AVIF images on every website you visit. Nothing is uploaded; all processing stays on the machine.

For particularly sensitive files — unreleased product photos, client deliverables under NDA, legal documents — the zero-upload property matters more than convenience. Loading the page over a network connection and then disconnecting before dropping the files in is a valid and intentional use: the converter continues to work fully offline once the page has loaded, because there is no server dependency.

The built-in sips command and Preview are equally private by nature — both are local tools with no network component. If you are already on Ventura and converting a small number of files, either of those is the simplest path. The browser route matters most when you are on an older macOS, on a restricted machine, or converting a batch large enough to make a script-less drag-and-drop workflow worth setting up.