HEIC to AV1 Converter

How to Convert HEIC to AV1 Online

1. Upload Your HEIC Files: Drag and drop or click "Add Files" to grab HEIC photos straight from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac Photos export. Drop in a single still, a Live Photo's key frame, a Burst sequence, or hundreds of HEICs to assemble into one AV1 video. Batch is supported — point at an entire folder.
2. Pick a Quality Preset and Compression Mode: Default is the Very High preset on Constant Quality, which lets the AV1 encoder hold a fixed visual-quality target across every frame regardless of complexity. Switch to Constraint Quality to cap peak bitrate (useful when the output must fit a streaming budget), or step the Quality Preset down (Very High → High → Medium → Low → Very Low) to shrink the file. AV1 typically delivers ~30% smaller files than HEVC and ~50% smaller than H.264 at the same visual quality, so even the High preset is small compared to a comparable HEIC-to-MP4 export.
3. Set Image Duration, Resolution, and Background Color (Optional): Image Duration controls how long each HEIC sits on screen — 1/60 second for a 60 fps timelapse up to 10 seconds for a slow photo show. For Video resolution, pick "Keep original" to preserve the iPhone's native 4032×3024 (12 MP) or 8064×6048 (48 MP, iPhone 14 Pro and later) frame, choose a Preset Resolution (240P through 2160P / 4K), or enter exact Width and Height with aspect ratio locked. Background Color (Black default, plus White and 22 named colors) fills the letterbox / pillarbox area when an iPhone's 4:3 source doesn't fill a 16:9 or 9:16 output. Merge strategy decides whether all images become one AV1 file or each HEIC produces its own.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. Files process in your browser session and download as a single .av1 / .ivf / .mkv-wrapped AV1 file — no sign-up, no watermark, no cap on the number of input HEICs.

Why Convert HEIC to AV1?

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) has been the default still-image format on every iPhone since the iPhone 7 / iOS 11, released September 2017. It wraps HEVC-compressed image data in an MPEG-H HEIF container — efficient on storage, but locked behind Apple's HEVC licensing situation, which is why most non-Apple platforms still struggle to open .heic files natively. AV1 is the AOMedia Video 1 codec, finalised by the Alliance for Open Media on 28 March 2018, royalty-free, and adopted by Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo, and Meta as the long-term replacement for H.264 and HEVC. Converting HEIC photos into an AV1 video produces the smallest possible motion file from your iPhone library — useful any time you need video output AND the recipient's pipeline supports modern codecs:

• Bandwidth-sensitive web playback — Netflix, YouTube, and Vimeo all serve AV1 to capable devices because it cuts roughly 30% of the bytes versus HEVC at matched quality. A 2-minute 1080p slideshow that lands at ~60 MB in HEVC drops to ~40 MB in AV1, which matters on slow connections, cellular data caps, or large embedded backgrounds.
• Future-proof archive of an iPhone photo collection — AV1 is the codec broadcasters and streamers are standardising on through 2030 and beyond. Encoding a vacation album or wedding gallery to AV1 at the Very High preset keeps file size small while staying readable on the codec the next generation of devices will decode in hardware.
• Modern browser-native slideshows for portfolio sites — Chrome 70+, Firefox 67+, Edge 121+, and Safari 17+ on Apple silicon (M3 / iPhone 15 Pro / iPhone 16) all decode AV1 directly in the browser, so a photographer's <video> tag pointing at an AV1 file plays without a Vimeo or YouTube wrapper.
• iPhone Burst Mode and timelapse stacks — A 2,000-frame burst of HEICs at 1/30 second per frame produces a 67-second 30 fps clip. Encoded in AV1 it lands well under 50 MB at 1080p, where the same input would push 100+ MB in HEVC and 200+ MB in H.264.
• Discord, Telegram, and modern messaging — Discord (free tier 10 MB attachment cap since September 2024), Telegram (2 GB), and Signal all play AV1-in-MKV containers. A 30-photo iPhone montage at 4 seconds each easily fits the Discord free cap as AV1 where it would not as HEVC.
• Replacing animated GIFs in product pages — A 12-frame iPhone product-photo loop encoded as AV1 is roughly 1/20th the size of the equivalent GIF and shows up in <video autoplay loop muted> on every modern browser. For a GIF target instead, see HEIC to GIF.

HEIC vs AV1 — Format Comparison

Quality Preset and Compression Mode Quick Guide

Image Duration → Frame Rate Quick Reference

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the AV1 file play on iPhone, iPad, or older Macs?

AV1 hardware decoding on Apple silicon arrived with the iPhone 15 Pro / iPhone 16 line and the M3 generation of MacBook Pro / iMac / Mac mini. Earlier devices (iPhone 14 and below, M1 / M2 Macs, every Intel Mac) can play AV1 in software through Safari 17+ but battery cost is higher and 4K playback may stutter. If your audience is mainly on older Apple gear, HEIC to MP4 with H.264 or HEVC is the safer pick. AV1 is the right call when the recipient is on Chrome / Firefox / Edge desktop or a 2024-or-newer Apple device.

Why is AV1 so much smaller than the HEVC inside the HEIC?

HEIC stores each photo as an HEVC-compressed still — efficient frame-by-frame, but it has no concept of motion compensation between frames because there is no time dimension. When you render N HEICs into an AV1 video the encoder runs full inter-frame prediction across the sequence, so static or slowly-changing regions (sky, walls, backgrounds) are reused across frames rather than re-encoded. That, plus AV1's stronger transforms, deeper partition trees, and better entropy coding, is where the ~30% saving over HEVC comes from on slideshow content.

What's the difference between Constant Quality and Constraint Quality?

Constant Quality (also called CRF / Constant Rate Factor in AV1 encoders) targets a fixed visual-quality level and lets bitrate vary frame by frame — easy stretches get small bitrates, complex stretches get more. The output looks consistent end-to-end but you can't predict the file size up front. Constraint Quality caps the peak bitrate so the output fits a known size budget (useful for streaming or upload caps), at the cost of dipping quality on complex frames. For a personal photo slideshow Constant Quality is almost always what you want; for a video being streamed at 5 Mbps Constraint is the right tool.

Can I make a vertical Reels or TikTok video from one iPhone HEIC?

Pick the 1080×1920 preset under Video resolution. The converter centers your HEIC and pads the unused area with the Background Color (Black default). For a square Instagram feed post use 1080×1080; YouTube and Facebook landscape use 1920×1080. Note that Instagram and TikTok do not currently accept AV1 uploads — both platforms re-encode anything you upload to H.264. If your destination is an upload to one of those apps, HEIC to MP4 avoids the round-trip transcode.

How long will the AV1 video be if I upload N HEICs?

Output duration = number of HEICs × Image Duration. A 60-photo iPhone vacation album at 4 seconds each = 240 seconds (4 minutes). 1,800 burst frames at 1/30 second = a 60-second 30 fps timelapse. Image Duration is per-image and applied uniformly across the batch — drag to reorder before clicking Convert. Set Merge strategy to "Merge images" to produce one AV1 file; pick "Video per image" to get one AV1 per HEIC.

What happens if my HEICs are different aspect ratios (portrait vs landscape)?

iPhone shoots 4:3 by default but landscape orientation, Portrait Mode (which can crop tighter), and Pro RAW (variable) coexist in any album. Each HEIC is scaled to fit inside the chosen output frame while preserving its source aspect ratio, then padded with the chosen Background Color — letterbox bars for tall sources in a wide output, pillarbox bars for wide sources in a tall output. For uniform framing across an album, resize HEIC all images to one ratio before converting.

Is AV1 quality really better than HEVC at the same file size?

In Netflix's published codec comparison testing AV1 averaged about 30% better compression efficiency than HEVC and 50% better than H.264 on streaming content (BD-rate). The gap is larger on synthetic / animated content and smaller on noisy hand-held footage. On a slideshow built from clean iPhone HEICs you'll see the higher end of that range — the smooth, denoised iPhone image pipeline is exactly what AV1's larger transforms compress well.

Can I shrink an existing AV1 file from this output further?

Yes — once you have the AV1 file from this tool, compress AV1 re-encodes it at a lower bitrate or smaller resolution for tighter size targets without changing the codec. For a different output codec entirely (H.264 / H.265), pipe through HEIC to MP4 instead.

What's the maximum number of HEICs and is there a file size cap?

There's no hard cap on the number of input images, but the encode runs in your browser session, so very large jobs depend on device RAM. As a reference: 500 × 12 MP iPhone HEICs at 1 second each produces a ~5 minute 1080p AV1 in the 30-80 MB range depending on Quality Preset. iPhone 14 Pro / 15 Pro / 16 Pro 48 MP HEICs are roughly 4× larger per source file — close other tabs and let the encoder finish if you're pushing thousands of frames at 4K.