[ENH]: Support avif as output format

[rotsee]

Problem

Since v3.6.0, Matplotlib supports webp output (yay!), but I couldn't find a ticket tracking Avif support, so here's a feature request for savefig to support saving as .avif.

relevant links:

• CanIUse
• Pillow pull request

Proposed solution

No response

[jklymak]

I think this would need to wait for pillow to support?

[ksunden]

While Pillow support is a prerequisite (and probably sufficient) condition for savefig to support AVIF, animations actually may have some support already.

Newer versions of ffmpeg support AVIF (though I could not test easily because the version in my distro's repository is too old).

The imagemagick writer did save an AVIF file. However, it may have only saved a single frame... (Not 100% sure if that is a viewer program problem or file output problem)

ani.save("test.avif", writer="imagemagick")

Gives: (zipped AVIF file because github doesn't allow AVIF directly) test.zip

[github-actions[bot]]

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[fdintino]

Until that PR is merged you can use a separate package, pillow-avif-plugin, to allow Pillow to save AVIF images.

[u7228810]

hello, has this been worked on yet? Am I able to work on this as my first issue?

[u7228810]

what would be the difficulty level of this issue?

[sgcartwright]

I have successfully added this functionality by adding the pillow-avif-plugin library to all relevant files. I am working on making a pull request with these changes. I added the pillow-avif-plugin library to all the requirements files where pillow is listed, so it is automatically installed.

[timhoffm]

We want to keep our dependencies small. Therefore, I don't think we should add the plugins to our requirements.

[rotsee]

There seems to be progress on this upstream: https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/5201

[rotsee]

Pillow now supports avif (when built from source) https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/releasenotes/11.2.1.html

[MiniX16]

So, would it make sense to try implementing support for AVIF now, or should we wait until it's officially included in the Pillow binaries (if that's supposed to happen)?

[AtharvaJaiswal005]

Hi! I’d like to work on this issue. Is anyone else already working on it or are there any specific guidelines I should follow? (this is my first contribution)

[rotsee]

With Pillow 1.3 avif support is now included in Pillow’s wheels (except some):

https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/releasenotes/11.3.0.html#avif-support-in-wheels

[timhoffm]

Is there anything to do on our side? I'd expect that saving will "just work" with 1.3?

[rotsee]

Is there anything to do on our side? I'd expect that saving will "just work" with 1.3?

With matplotlib==3.10.3 and pillow==11.3.0 I still get:

> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
> fig = plt.figure()
> fig.savefig('test.avif')

/.../

`ValueError: Format 'avif' is not supported (supported formats: eps, jpeg, jpg, pdf, pgf, png, ps, raw, rgba, svg, svgz, tif, tiff, webp)

[timhoffm]

Ah, we need to internally register the format. Changes should be analogous to #21274.