Why are so many images now in unusual file formats?

5 points·paulpauper··7 comments

A common one is webp. This hinders image uploading services and makes it harder to save and share the images.

WEBP is no longer "unusual" as it now finally has downstream support for the most popular use cases. The anti-WEBP memes are out of date and it's generally better than even a highly-compressed PNG.

At this point it's been around for over 15 years, too. I thought it was younger than that, but it was announced in September 2010.

One of the reasons people choose webp is file size. If your images are smaller then you transfer and store fewer bytes. That can have benefits on cost and speed of transferring those to the client.

Because jpeg is very old and we want something better, but a replacement hasn't won yet.

webp is common, but avif is better. jpegxl too, but it's lacking software support.

I hate webp. Somehow I can’t copy paste it to some apps I use frequently. And I only started seeing it getting popular since last year so I must have lived in a cave.

Because there are no files or saving in a post-iPad world. Only post sharing, link sharing.

So the only people left to worry about them are the performance (over)engineers, where compressed size wins.

Steve Jobs tried to do away with the filesystem in iOS. It should be very telling that there is now a Files app on iOS and iPadOS. Its improvements were also a highlight of recent releases, and apps are moving more toward using files instead of their own sandboxes.

Files are clearly not dead.

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