Feature request: AVIF image support

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Penpot was the first of it’s kind to support Webp images.

Figma still doesn’t support the very pervasive WebP format despite all the major browsers being compatible with it.

Why? because of how Figma is written whereas Penpot can rely on the browser to do the bitmap lifting - which is great.

Currently Avif image support isn’t available Penpot however.
The biggest hurdle may be that MS Edge still doesn’t support it: AVIF image format | Can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc

One option could be a compatibility modal.
Flagging that a document uses “media unsupported by your browser”

Another could be waiting until Edge turns green and then turning on AVIF support.

I’m happy for both or either. Whatever best lets creators keep creating with the assets they already have.

As they say: “performance is a feature”
AVIF is a super efficient file format, and for projects that rely on photography this could be a boon.

$0.02

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hello @andyfitz

Really interesting idea; so i have looked on it and that are my conclusions:

  • On penpot-backend (when images are validated, converted and persisted using the appropriate storage backend) right now uses the imagemagic 6.x which has very buggy support for AVIF
  • We are using that version of imagemagick because our base distribution (ubuntu LTS) comes with this version
  • There are no packages ready to install of imagemagick 7.x on ubuntu/debian
  • I have compiled it with imagemagick 7.x and tested and looks like it works as expected

So the problem here is: we probably need to compile it from source; and this is a bit problematic. I mean, we can stage it on our docker images and it will be available. But our SAAS does not uses docker for deployment, so we need to spend time create a specific ARM64 package for our SAAS before continue.

I don’t say no, I just explained the current status for make the AVIF format support available on penpot.

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In my view this is something that can wait for Imagemagick 7 to reach stable distribution repos so that you don’t have to carry custom compilation.

In this case, I’ll take the official answer as “it’s coming” as it most likely will land once the disti’s get up to speed :slight_smile:

Thanks so much for looking into this!

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