There is a quiet contradiction sitting at the centre of Microsoft’s image-format story, and almost nobody talks about it. AVIF is, by most technical measures, the best consumer image format currently available — roughly 30% smaller than WebP at equivalent quality, with HDR, 10- and 12-bit colour, and alpha transparency. It is also, unusually, royalty-free. There are no patent pools demanding a licence fee to decode it. And yet, in May 2026, you still cannot open a single AVIF file on a clean Windows 11 install without a manual trip to the Microsoft Store, and you cannot insert one into PowerPoint or Word on a Mac at all.
That is worth pausing on. The format that costs nobody anything is the one that arrives switched off. Meanwhile HEIC — which is encumbered by HEVC patent licensing and genuinely costs Microsoft money — at least has an official, if irritating, paid path on every Windows machine. The economics point one way; Microsoft’s behaviour points the other. This is the state of AVIF support as it actually exists, not as the marketing describes it.
What AVIF is, briefly
AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) was created by the Alliance for Open Media — the consortium behind the AV1 video codec, whose members include Google, Apple, Netflix, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Amazon. It applies AV1’s compression to still images. The format was standardised in 2019, Netflix published the first public AVIF in 2018, and adoption since has been steady rather than explosive: Chrome added native support at version 85, Firefox at 93, and — notably late — Edge only at version 121.
The detail that matters for everything below: AVIF uses AV1 compression, not HEVC. That makes it a different beast from HEIC, which is HEIF-conformant but leans on HEVC internally. Different codec, different decoder, different licensing reality. Anyone who assumes the two formats behave the same way on Windows is going to be surprised.
The Windows 11 reality: “native” with an asterisk
Microsoft and the Alliance for Open Media both describe AVIF as “supported” on Windows 10 and 11. That is true in the same way a car is “supported” by a road you have to build yourself first. Out of the box, Windows 11 does nothing with an AVIF file. Double-click one and, depending on your build and which apps you have, you will get either an error or a prompt to install a component from the Store.
The component is the AV1 Video Extension, and it is free. Once installed, it registers AV1 decoding with the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) — the system-level image pipeline that File Explorer, the Photos app, and Paint all draw on. With it in place, AVIF behaves like any other image: thumbnails appear in Explorer, EXIF metadata reads correctly, the Photos app and Paint open the files, and Windows Media Player handles AV1 video too. The same extension covers both AVIF still images and AV1 video, which is a small piece of good design buried inside an otherwise confusing situation.
Here is where AVIF actually works in 2026, and where it does not:
| Environment | AVIF support |
|---|---|
| Windows 11 File Explorer (thumbnails, preview, metadata) | Yes — with AV1 Video Extension installed |
| Windows 11 Photos app / Paint | Yes — with the extension |
| Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox | Yes — native, no extension needed |
| Office for Windows (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) | Yes — relies on the OS codec, so the extension covers it |
| Office for Mac (Word, PowerPoint) | No — not supported; file appears greyed out or errors |
| Clean Windows 11 with nothing installed | No — manual Store install required first |
The Office adoption lag is real, and it is uneven
The Office situation is the most misunderstood part of this. On Windows, Office does not implement its own AVIF support — it borrows the operating system’s. Because Word, PowerPoint, and Excel insert images through the same WIC pipeline that the Photos app uses, installing the AV1 Video Extension quietly fixes Office as well. This is why users who could not paste an AVIF copied from a stock-photo site into PowerPoint found that installing the AV1 Video Extension resolved it: they did not fix PowerPoint, they fixed Windows, and PowerPoint inherited the result. Sites like Unsplash now serve AVIF by default, so this is a more common collision than it was two years ago.
Office for Mac is a different story, and the evidence is unambiguous: as of 2026, PowerPoint and Word for Mac do not support AVIF. The file is rejected outright. The reason is structural — Office for Mac does not tap into the same Windows codec layer, and Microsoft has been characteristically slow to add the format to the Mac suite’s own image handling. WebP, by comparison, is supported in recent Microsoft 365 builds of Office for Mac. So the lag is not “Office is behind on modern formats” in general. It is specifically AVIF, specifically on the Mac, that has been left out — while WebP made it across.
Decoding is solved; creating AVIF is the part Windows ignores
One distinction gets lost in nearly every “how to open AVIF” guide, and it matters for anyone planning to standardise on the format. The AV1 Video Extension is fundamentally a decoder. It lets Windows and Office read AVIF files. It does not turn the Office apps, Paint, or the Photos app into reliable AVIF exporters. There is no “Save as AVIF” worth depending on inside the Office suite, and Paint’s format options remain conservative.
This is partly a quirk of the codec itself: AV1 compression is expensive to encode and cheap to decode. Viewing an AVIF is fast; producing a good one takes real CPU time, which is why the heavy lifting lives in dedicated tools rather than being baked into general-purpose apps. The upshot for a workplace is asymmetric — Windows users can consume AVIF the moment the extension is installed, but generating AVIF assets in the first place still belongs to image editors and command-line encoders, not to Office. Treat AVIF as an inbound format you can accept, not yet an outbound format you can produce inside the Microsoft stack.
Why a free codec is still gated
If the AV1 Video Extension costs nothing, why is it not simply built in? This is the question that does not have a satisfying public answer. It is not licensing — AV1 is royalty-free by design, which was the entire reason the Alliance for Open Media built it. The most plausible explanations are mundane: codec components ship as separate, independently updatable Store packages so Microsoft can patch them without a full Windows update; and bundling more decoders by default increases the OS attack surface and maintenance load.
What the arrangement produces in practice, though, is friction that lands on the user. You need a Microsoft account and Store access to get the extension. On locked-down corporate machines where the Store is restricted — a meaningful slice of the Bing/Edge audience — the “free” codec may be effectively unavailable, and IT has to deploy it through provisioning instead. The format that was supposed to lower barriers ends up gated behind account and policy walls.
AVIF vs HEIC in 2026: the licensing fault line
The cleanest way to understand where AVIF sits is to put it next to HEIC, because the contrast explains almost everything.
AVIF and HEIC are technically close cousins — both descend from the HEIF container family, both deliver large savings over JPEG, both support HDR and transparency. The split is the codec underneath. HEIC uses HEVC (H.265), which carries patent-pool licensing fees, and that single fact is why opening iPhone photos on Windows is a paid, two-part ordeal involving both a free container extension and a separately-licensed HEVC decoder. The full picture of that mess is covered in our complete guide to HEIC on Windows 11. AVIF carries none of that baggage. Its decoder is free precisely because AV1 is free.
So the irony is sharp: the format with the cleaner legal status (AVIF) and the better compression gets a free, optional, easily-missed Store extension — while the format with the licensing problem (HEIC) gets a paid extension that Windows actively nags you to buy. One is buried; the other is monetised. Neither is built in.
What to expect over the next year
There are early signs the gap is closing, though slowly. Microsoft’s incremental Windows 11 feature drops through early 2026 have been adding modern-format handling in adjacent areas — WebP wallpaper support arrived in a 2026 preview build, for instance — and there has been roadmap chatter about broader native support for formats including AVIF and JPEG XL. None of that has yet translated into AVIF working on a clean install without the extension, and Microsoft has not committed to a date.
The realistic forecast for the next twelve months: the AV1 Video Extension stays the mechanism on Windows; Office for Windows continues to ride the OS codec; and Office for Mac remains the laggard most likely to gain AVIF support eventually but without any announced timeline. JPEG XL is the wildcard — it has stronger backing in some quarters than AVIF did at the equivalent stage, and if Microsoft does add native modern-format handling, it may arrive for several formats at once rather than AVIF alone.
What to do right now
For most people the practical path is short. If you work on Windows and need AVIF in Explorer, Photos, or Office, install the AV1 Video Extension from the Microsoft Store once and the problem disappears system-wide — including in Word and PowerPoint. If you are on a managed machine without Store access, ask IT to deploy it, because there is no clean user-level workaround that matches native WIC support.
If you are on a Mac, or you need to hand a file to someone who might be, do not rely on AVIF inside Office — convert to PNG or high-quality JPEG first, or use the same conversion discipline you would apply to other awkward formats. For vector assets the calculus is different again; that belongs to a separate conversation about how SVG behaves across the Office apps.
The short version: AVIF is the better format that Microsoft has chosen to leave switched off. Until that changes, “supported” means “supported once you go and turn it on.”
Current state verified May 2026. AVIF support in Windows and Office is evolving; this page is reviewed quarterly.