Avhash is a BlurHash alternative that uses stripped AV1 frames as tiny image placeholders. It encodes image data more efficiently than BlurHash by removing container and header bytes, then regenerates them during decoding for browser-native AVIF rendering. The format supports quality tuning and uses base-88 encoding for HTML-safe attribute storage.
A Rails 8.1 photo gallery app (friendlyfolio) serving 1,916 photos from three Friendly.rb conferences replaced a hosted service. The team optimized image delivery using Active Storage variants in AVIF, WebP, and JPEG formats across multiple sizes, learning key lessons about image optimization at scale that go beyond basic tutorials.