WebP, JPEGXL and AVIF are new image formats. Which one to choose?

One of the most frustrating experiences while browsing a site is the loading time of a site . Website speed is actually an important aspect, and if you want to make the most of it and improve its ranking , you shouldn't underestimate this aspect. Google itself has revealed that if a page isn't opened within the first 1-3 seconds , there's a 32% chance that users will abandon browsing before the website finishes loading. As the number of seconds it takes to load the page increases, abandonment increases exponentially.

Image loading is one of the main causes of long loading times.

Multimedia files, in particular images, are obviously necessary to make the experience within the site pleasant and complete. These files are usually the main reason for slow web pages - they are heavier than simple text string resources and take longer to display properly on our browsers, resulting in slow loading of the entire page.

Approximately 60% - 65% of megabytes on most web pages are images, so Google decided to create a free open source file format that while maintaining quality greatly reduces the size of images, the WebP format. Using this format, pages load faster, use less bandwidth, thus also saving battery, which is especially important on mobile devices.

How WebP works

Lossy WebP compression uses predictive coding to encode images, which is the same method that the VP8 video codec uses to compress key frames in a video. Predictive coding uses the values in adjacent pixel blocks to predict the value in one block and then encodes the difference only. Lossless WebP compression uses previously seen image fragments to reconstruct new pixels. If no interesting match is found, it may also use the local palette.

Picasa, ImageMagick, XnView, IrfanView and GIMP natively support WebP.

Telegraphics has distributed a free plug-in that enables WebP support in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and earlier versions. downloadable from this link: http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/product/WebPFormat

Just paste the .8bi file inside the Adobe folder at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop(version)\Required\Plug-ins\File Formats

Google has also released a plug-in for Microsoft Windows that enables WebP support in Windows Photo Viewer, Microsoft Office 2010, and any other application that uses the Windows Imaging Component.

But the overview of the new encodings for the images does not end here, in fact for some months now we have also been hearing about JPEG XL.

The JPEG XL format

The creators of JPEG XL claim that the format can make big changes to the popular JPEG such as great bandwidth savings and high fidelity image quality with no conversion required: JPEG XL can still read like a traditional JPEG .

JPEG XL is designed to meet the needs of professional photography and web image distribution. It supports a wide color gamut as well as high dynamic range and high bit depth images. JPEG XL also includes features such as animation, alpha channels, layers, thumbnails, progressive and lossless encoding to support a wide range of use cases, including but not limited to photo galleries, e-commerce, social media, interfaces user and cloud storage. To enable new applications, it also adds support for 360-degree images, scrolling images, large panoramas/mosaics, and printing.

JPEG XL offers significantly better image quality and compression ratios than older legacy JPEG.

The creators then insist on implying that the format was designed for computationally efficient encoding and decoding using software implementations without the need for additional hardware acceleration, even on mobile devices which results in better user experience. media with low data consumption.

These two formats alone are already making a lot of talk about themselves (reminding us old folks a bit of the battle between VHS and BETAMAX) but the Internet is a dynamic sector and new image formats come out all the time and among these there is one on which worth mentioning: the AVIF

The AVIF format

As the emerging image file format, AVIF stands for “AV1 Image File Format” is the future. This is essentially the specification for storing AV1-compressed still and animated images in the HEIF file format. Just to remind you, AV1 is the royalty-free video encoding format that has most tech-savvy people believe it's the next step in media compression.

You can check out some great examples of AVIF plus comparison to WebP, JPG, PNG on Jakearchibald .

Compared to image formats such as WebP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG and GIF; AVIF is compatible with high dynamic range imaging. It supports up to 12-bit color at full resolution and provides images up to 10 times smaller than other popular formats. AVIF offers animated, transparent and lossless images. It supports HDR. It has the most optimal compression and royalty-free as well. This new file format is currently supported by many big technology companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and others.

Obviously we could go on talking about other new or less new encoding formats but the list would be practically endless, but if you want to delve into the most well-known formats here is a list of the best image formats to use in 2021:

• WebP
• HEIF extension
• AVIF
• PNGs
• jpeg
• GIFs
• RAW
• TIFF
• BMP extension
• PSD
• SVG
• PDF
• env
• AI
• cdr