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Comment by fireattack | Hacker News Reader

IMHO these JPEG optimizers need to explain what optimization they actually do.

At the very least, it should mention if the optimization is lossless (by dropping metadata, optimizing Huffman table/progressive scan parameters etc.) or lossy: because they have very different use cases (sometimes you need the image to be pixel-wise identical).

Even better, if lossy, "how lossy" it is.

I'm aware it's using mozjpeg [1] which is pretty good (guetzli [2] is another good one for the interested); still, it comes with many settings and routines (both lossless and lossy) that can be configured.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg

[2] https://github.com/google/guetzli

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That's a very good point, thank you.

I could add some explanation on github and offer two kinds of optimization (lossless and lossy) and add a quality slider for the lossy one

is there a standard of proof these sites can provide about not sending data back to the servers? besides checking the network data, which it could delay to another visit or obfuscate easily

I don't know, sorry.

I mean, you can be completely sure that the website works offline by unplugging the cable/turning off your wifi connection after it's completely loaded. But that's just a functional test, not something you can expect users to do during a normal browsing session

thats not enough, it can send it in the next connection. unless you want to load a site once, and never connect your computer to the internet ever again.

How exactly could it obfuscate it? You can see every request in its entirety and if you see a request that you can't read, that's already enough reason to not use it. As for delaying it, it would have to store it somewhere like localStorage, which is just as easily inspectable.

If you're worried about that, loading it in a private window and switching to offline mode, then closing it after you're done makes any exfiltration impossible.

A service worker could send it after the tab is closed.

its easy to hide from network inspection

If you're this concerned that the app might delay sending until later, I would probably suggest you just use ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick locally instead. I use it all the time for processing photos. If you want to clean exif data look at exiftool. It's in most repos.

yeah thats what i do, but i wanna be able to use services like this

This is something the web platform is missing.

I'd like some API for a page to load, then become "offline". Then I can use it, and have the browser block any attempts to send/receive data from anywhere except local storage.

> At the very least, it should mention if the optimization is lossless [...] or lossy

True, the UI is optimized a bit too much :)

By looking very carefully at some test image I see that it is not lossless, there are more compression artifacts. Well, lossless would have been a miracle, it reduced the size of my photo from nearly 600 KB to just a bit over 180 KB.

Absolutely. Until now I had no idea what a JPEG optimizer is, and even the About page of jpeg.rocks said exactly nothing about what it does.

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