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Comment by joeblubaugh | Hacker News Reader

If JPEG XL doesn’t become useful on the web, is it really likely to become popular with camera manufacturers, professional image editing tools, etc?

What does it offer there that existing workflows can’t support? Do those advantages make up for the transcoding that every web publisher would need to do to make the outputs useful on the web?

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> If JPEG XL doesn’t become useful on the web, is it really likely to become popular with camera manufacturers, professional image editing tools, etc?

I suspect that eventually, the browser makers that are reluctant to add JpegXL support will do so, even if reluctantly, and so it will eventually "become useful on the web".

The reason why is Adobe added JpegXL as a compression format for PDF's, and as every browser maker wants their browser to also be a "PDF viewer", this means they must include a JpegXL decoder to be able to support PDF's going forward. If they must have a JpegXL decoder anyway, it is not that difficult to also add it as another supported format for the <img> tag.

Looking forward to a future where we can arbitrarily DoS anyone with a PDF that computes massive swaths of prime numbers.

Can't that future adopt basic resource / complexity limits to defuse the DOS bomb?

PDFs can already do arbitrary computation. You can even play tetris in them.

You used to be able to DoS the user's browser by sticking thousands of tiny animated gifs on the same page. You can't do that any more (AFAIK) because that's a bug so the browser developers fixed it. This is the same thing.

It's odd that apple didn't proactively guard against such concerns when adding a new format.

Most people using dedicated cameras shoot in RAW, then use a program to process and export the photos afterwards. So camera manufacturer buy-in isn't super important.

I've been exporting in JXL from Lightroom for a little while now, you get slightly smaller image sizes and HDR with no real downsides. On the web I imagine this will translate to higher quality images on social media since platforms can get more out of the same file size. It will also likely be the end of HEIF which is a pain to deal with due to patents.

The second paragraph doesn’t follow from my question, because it assumes JPEG XL does become useful on the web. The author believes AVIF is too far ahead already.

I suspect the name alone will help drive adoption, especially from non-technical people. Heck, I'm reasonably technical myself (but not expert in image formats) and my first instinct on encountering AVIF was to say "AVIF? Does that stand for AVI File?" And I would have assumed that it's a video format, not an image format. Whereas JPEG XL would have everyone who has ever used a digital camera saying "Ah, it's got JPEG in the name, that means it's a photo format".

Never underestimate the power of a well-known brand name in communicating things to people who know nothing else about the subject. The name is a big part of why I suspect JPEG XL will take off in popularity. (The lossless conversion to and from classic JPEG format is the other main reason).

There’s also a migration path where jpeg can be converted to jpeg xl losslessly. You can convert a jpeg to jxl then back to jpeg and its byte for byte identical.

For me, the name JPEG XL evoked a feeling of “this is going to be a lossy-only format with visible artifacts when used on raster images”, so I don’t think it’s a good name.

JXL is moments away from having almost universal web support. Safari supports it already, Chrome and Firefox are already set to turn the flag on by default in the next releases.

DNG added JPEG-XL as a format for both raw and compressed recently

The iPhone actually uses JPEG xl for its DNG raw files now.

I’ve been shooting with semipro to pro cameras for decades across brands, and I haven’t came across a single camera that supports shooting JPEG XL.

HEIF is what is getting support in recent models; but JPEG still rules supreme for its compatibility.

Web publishers should definitely be stripping metadata at least, and transcoding isn't much harder. For anyone who cares about bandwidth, transcoding to efficient formats is non-negotiable; if you don't, then why do anything? Just ship PNG, who cares?

I think one of the compelling use cases for camera manufacturers would be an interoperable format for editors. Since JXL has support for so many channels, you could load your image into an editor, edit it, add layers, etc., and export as JXL, which could be used for other things.

> Web publishers should definitely be stripping metadata at least

No, they shouldn't. Not blindly. Metadata can include copyright license information, such that stripping it violates the license to reproduce the image.

iPhones have been using it for its ProRAW format since 2024.

It has 3 options:

JPEG Lossless (most compatible)

JPEG-XL Losless

JPEG-XL Lossy

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