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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I've got no great love for these new image formats.

It's always a pain in the ass when you discover your phone has actually been saving your photos as heic or webp or avif or whatever and hardly anything will open them.

I could understand wanting to improve JPEG in the age of dial-up and 1.44MB floppy disks - 60% smaller images could have been a great benefit in those days. But today, even if I'm taking 30 photos every day at 4k resolution, it'd take 20 years to fill up a $50 1TB disk.

The other benefits of the format might be great for some specialist applications, but options like billion-pixel-wide images, 32 bits per channel and 4099 channels ready for medical imaging only get a shrug from me. I doubt my browser is going to start displaying 4099 channel images.

I just wish we could get rid of heic, webp and avif at the same time.

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> I could understand wanting to improve JPEG in the age of dial-up and 1.44MB floppy disks - 60% smaller images could have been a great benefit in those days. But today, even if I'm taking 30 photos every day at 4k resolution, it'd take 20 years to fill up a $50 1TB disk.

60% smaller images are great for hosting providers. We have ample storage and bandwidth compared to the 90s, but it still ain't that cheap.

lossless? large sizes? multi-band (> 3) data? transparency? animation? I work in software support of scientific imaging, and jpeg-xl looks to be the only format to date that supports those features in addition to excellent compression and royalty-free licenses (we currently use jpeg-2000 which has no good/fast open-source implementation, we really on an expensive proprietary license with lots of restrictions on redistribution, in fact our industry is largely moving back to TIFF now with the storage factors you mentioned, but using 10x the disk space is non-trivial).

You very clearly don't care about 90% of the rest of the world who doesn't have fast internet

you also very clearly don't care about the entire internet experience, at all, whatsoever.

Edit: 60% space savings only available in the age of the floppy.... what? 60% cost savings when serving multiple terabytes of image data is useless?

You seem to view everything through the extremely tiny lens of a photographer or something... pun intended

2g mobile still running in my country

This is extremely aggressive and personal, I suggest editing out the edit.

WebP was I believe the first image format that supported lossy compression with transparency. You could argue that you can just use PNG if you want transparency, but allowing lossy compression if you need alpha is more like 10x smaller, not a mere 60%. Also it came out back in the era when 4MB for a web page was a lot.

AVIF was the first format accepted by the web that supports HDR (not already tone-mapped HDR, true HDR.) Which maybe you don't personally care about, but is something that fundamentally cannot be done with existing JPEG and PNG implementations.

AVIF might not have happened, and the above paragraph might have read "HEIC", if HEVC had had similar licensing terms as H.264. But there's no predicting that stuff before it happens.

The thing is, you may not care, but web hosts definitely do, especially because cloud providers get you in the door with cheap storage/compute and then gouge you for outgoing bandwidth. Cutting image sizes by 60% when you're serving millions of images adds up to huge $$$ savings.

Even if you don't care at all about file sizes (which is definitely A Take), there is the whole other side of improving image quality.

Everything about computer imagery is pretty sadly limited when compared to the capabilities of human eyes and brains. And for quite some time now the ends of the pipeline (camera sensors and computer displays) have been improving, but are bottlenecked by the middle of the pipeline (image formats).

Call me back when 1TB smartphones are $150. Until then, these formats are a life saver. Maybe instead of dragging everyone down you could champion for programs to better their support?

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