AVIF Metadata Viewer — Read EXIF and ICC From an AVIF

Why this format displays and HEIC does not

The difference is not technical merit, it is licensing. HEIC carries HEVC, which is encumbered by patent pools that made browser vendors decline it. AVIF carries AV1, published by the Alliance for Open Media with a royalty-free licence, and Chrome, Firefox and Safari all added decoders within a few years of each other. Two files can share a container design and have completely different lives because of who has to pay whom.

What that means for reading one here

The preview comes from the browser's own decoder, so it appears immediately and at full quality, with no WebAssembly fallback in the way. It also means an AVIF behaves like an ordinary web image everywhere else: it will render in a page, in a preview pane and in a chat client, carrying whatever metadata it has along with it.

Most AVIF files have been through a converter

AVIF exists mainly to make web images smaller, so the typical file was produced by a build step or a CDN from a JPEG or PNG. Those pipelines usually discard metadata to save bytes, which is why so many AVIF files read as almost empty here. When one does carry EXIF, it was inherited from the source image rather than written by a camera — few cameras produce AVIF directly.

The shape of an AVIF

An AVIF is the same container as a HEIC with a different codec inside it. The picture is coded with AV1 and sits in mdat; anything that describes it sits under meta. As with HEIC the figure draws one level: colr and av1C are properties nested deeper than the box they are drawn in.

Structure
Can hold metadata
The picture

Where an AVIF keeps things

ftyp: The brand, avif or avis. Declares what the rest of the file is.
meta: The box holding every non-picture item.
Exif item: An EXIF block, when the converter was told to keep one.
mime item: XMP, same mechanism as in HEIC.
colr: Colour profile or coding-independent code points.
av1C: The AV1 decoder configuration. Structure, not metadata.

Questions about AVIF

Does AVIF keep EXIF when I convert a JPEG to it?

Only if the converter was asked to. Most web-oriented pipelines drop metadata by default because the whole point of the conversion is a smaller file. Drop the result here and you will see what survived.

Is AVIF the same as HEIC?

Same container family, different codec and different licence. Both are ISO Base Media File Format holding coded pictures as items. HEIC uses HEVC, AVIF uses AV1 — which is why browsers display one and not the other.

Can an AVIF be animated?

Yes, with the avis brand and a sequence of frames. Re-encode Cleanup draws a single frame, so cleaning an animated AVIF returns a still image.

Why is my AVIF cleaned into a JPEG?

Because writing an AVIF needs an AV1 encoder, which the workspace does not carry. Decoding is the part browsers provide. So cleanup exports a JPEG, and you trade the container for a file with nothing embedded.

What it can do

Remove EXIF data: Drop a photo and download a copy with its embedded metadata removed. JPEG loses its EXIF segment losslessly; HEIC, PNG, WebP and the rest are re-encoded. Nothing is uploaded.
Remove GPS location: See the coordinates a photo is carrying, then download a copy without them. JPEG loses the location tags and keeps everything else. Nothing is uploaded.
Edit JPEG EXIF: Change the title, author, description, copyright, software and capture time on a JPEG, then download the edited copy. Runs locally; your original file is never modified.
XMP, IPTC and ICC viewer: Read every metadata group a file carries — EXIF, XMP, IPTC, ICC, maker notes — grouped and exportable as JSON. For asset QA, forensics and debugging a pipeline. Nothing is uploaded.
Open several photos: Open up to fifty photos, see which of them carry a location, and take the whole set out as a spreadsheet. Nothing is uploaded, and the originals are never written to.