Shrink JPG Photos by Converting Them to AVIF
If you are optimising a website or just tired of photos eating storage, AVIF is the format worth knowing about. It uses the same compression family as modern video codecs, and in practice that means a picture saved as AVIF is frequently around half the size of the equivalent JPG at a visually similar quality, sometimes better than that. For anyone watching page-load times, that is a large saving spread across every image on a page.
This tool re-encodes each JPG as AVIF at the quality you choose. AVIF's quality scale is not the same as JPEG's, so the default sits at 55, a setting that looks clean for photographs while still delivering most of the size reduction. Nudge it higher if you want to be conservative with detail, or lower if shaving every last kilobyte is the priority. Because your source is already a JPG that has been compressed once, there is no benefit to pushing the quality to the maximum.
On a real website the saving compounds. A gallery or product page might carry twenty or thirty images, and trimming each one to around half its weight can shave a second or more off the time the page needs to become usable, which search engines and visitors both notice. The common pattern is to serve AVIF to browsers that accept it while keeping a JPG fallback in the markup for the rest, so nobody is left looking at a blank space. The one practical cost is that AVIF takes longer to encode than a JPG, a few extra moments per image, which is why it is a job you do once at publish time rather than on the fly.
Where AVIF works today
Every current major browser now displays AVIF, so for the web it is a safe modern choice, ideally offered alongside a JPG fallback for the small number of older clients still in use. Outside the browser, support is thinner, so if a file is destined for an old desktop viewer or a print workflow, JPG or PNG remains the more dependable pick. The JPG to WebP route is a useful middle ground, trading a little of AVIF's efficiency for even broader compatibility.
If you ever need to go back, AVIF to JPG converts straight back, and PNG to AVIF does the same job for PNG sources.