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HEVCut, AVIF photo encoding for iPhone, iPad and Mac

HEVCut, AVIF photo encoding for iPhone, iPad and Mac

by alepacheco-dev·May 22, 2026·3 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemSolve My Problem

First AVIF encoder on iOS fills a gap Apple left open since 2022.

Strengths
  • •Implements AVIF encoding where Apple only provided decoding APIs.
  • •Preserves HDR gain maps while halving file sizes compared to HEIC.
  • •Runs entirely on-device with no cloud uploads for privacy.
Weaknesses
  • •Limited to Apple ecosystem; no cross-platform utility.
  • •Storage cleanup features are generic compared to built-in iOS tools.
Category
Productivity
Target Audience

iPhone users running out of iCloud storage

Similar To

Shortcuts · ImageOptim · CloudConvert

Post Description

HEVCut is a photo and video compression app for Apple platforms I have been working on. Today's update adds AVIF as an output format for photos, which I believe makes it the first app on the App Store to ship AVIF encoding on iOS.

Apple added AVIF decode in 2022 (iOS 16, macOS Ventura) but never shipped an encoder, public or private. Photos cannot export AVIF, ImageIO cannot write it, and no other third party app on the store does it either. So if you wanted AVIF files coming off an iPhone, your options were "send the original somewhere else and re-encode it" or "wait."

On typical iPhone photos, AVIF lands around half the size of HEIC at matched visual quality. A 5 MB HEIC compresses to roughly 700 KB. HDR (including gain map HDR content from newer iPhones) is preserved, SDR works correctly across readers, everything runs on device.

The rest of the app does the usual library cleanup things: HEIC and HEVC recompression, duplicate detection, surfacing space hogs, swipe to delete, a private vault. AVIF is the new piece.

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Niche GemSolve My Problem
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