I can be quite passionate about image codecs. A “codec battle” is brewing, and I’m not the only one to have opinions about that. Obviously, as the chair of the JPEG XL ad hoc group in the JPEG Committee, I’m firmly in the camp of the codec I’ve been working on for years. Here in this post, however, I’ll strive to be fair and neutral.
When the JPEG codec was being developed in the late 1980s, no standardized, lossy image-compression formats existed. JPEG became ready at exactly the right time in 1992, when the World Wide Web and digital cameras were about to become a thing. The introduction of HTML’s <img> tag in 1995 ensured the recognition of JPEG as the web format—at least for photographs. During the 1990s, digital cameras replaced analog ones and, given the limited memory capacities of that era, JPEG became the standard format for photography, especially for consumer-grade cameras.
In case you wondered if JPEG 2000 is still in use, the answer is a resounding yes. A recent Cloudinary post sheds light on JPEG 2000’s format’s usability and the reasons why it’s not as widely adopted as other formats, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. This article elaborates in depth the pros and cons of JPEG 2000 in relation to seven common image formats.
JPEG images are either progressive or nonprogressive, depending on their encoding order, not politics.
Encoding of and decoding of nonprogressive occurs in this simple order: from top to bottom and from left to right. Consequently, when a nonprogressive JPEG is loading on a slow connection, you see the image’s top part first, followed by the other parts as loading progresses.
According to a W3Techs survey, the images on 74 percent of websites worldwide are in JPEG or PNG format and for good reason: those images display well on all browsers. However, several newer image formats are well worth consideration, a leading example being WebP. This post describes how to adopt WebP as your image format and, accordingly, lower your image weight by approximately 30 percent and reduce the load time of your websites or native apps.
(Photo by Erol Ahmed)
A few weeks ago, Google officially announced a new JPEG encoder, called Guetzli.
Cloudinary has been tracking Guetzli since it was soft-launched in October; it has been amazing to watch news about it bubble up into the pop-tech press.
Cellular Automata are pretty cool things to play with. There are many, many variants, like Conway’s Game of Life, Abelian Sandpiles, Langton’s Loops and Brian’s Brain, but in this blogpost, I’ll just talk about the simplest kinds of cellular automata: one-dimensional cellular automata.
JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs — oh my! Most web developers only learn which format to use through trial, error, and long experience, and not necessarily by fully understanding how these formats actually work.
In part one (One pixel is worth three thousand words) of this turned-to-be-two-part blog post, I discussed one-pixel images and how well different image formats “compress” these images. I was surprised how much there is to be said about the matter. This was supposed to be a short blog post, describing one-pixel images and how they compress, and instead it became a glorious monster (and also a two part blog post…).
A couple of months ago while taking a break from implementing cool new features like q_auto and g_auto, I was joking in our team chat about how well various image formats “compress” one-pixel images. In response, Orly — who runs the blog — asked me if I’d write a post about single-pixel images. I said: "Sure, why not. But it will be a very short blog post. After all, there’s not much you can say about a single pixel."