Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024)

From what I've seen WebP is probably the strongest contender for a JPEG replacement. It's pretty common in the indie game scene for example to re-encode a JPEG game to WebP for better image quality and often a significant (25% or more) savings on installer size. Support is coming, albeit somewhat slowly. It was pretty bad in Ubuntu 22, but several apps have added support in Ubuntu 24. Windows 11 supports WebP in Photos and Paint for another example.

> Just as there is a clear winner for video - av1 - there seems to be nothing in the way of "this is clearly the future, at least for the next few years" when it comes to encoding images.

Say what? A random scan across the internet will reveal more videos in MP4 and H.264 format than av1. Perhaps streaming services have switched, but that is not what regular consumers usually use to make and store movies.

For video it's not as easy as it takes way more compute and requires hardware support.

You can take any random device and it will be able to decode h264 at 4k. h265 not so much.

As for av1 - my Ryzent 5500GT released in 2024 does not support it.

> How in the world do people store images / photos nowadays?

Well, as JPEGs? Why not? Quality is just fine if you don't touch the quality slider in Photoshop or other software.

For "more" there's still lossless camera RAW formats and large image formats like PSD and whatnot.

JPEG is just fine.

I've done a few shootouts at various times in the last 10 years. I finally decided WebP was good for the web maybe two years ago, that is, I have 'set it or forget it' settings and get a good quality/size result consistently. (JPEG has the problem that you really need to turn the knob yourself since a quality level good for one image may not be good for another one)

I don't like AVIF, at least not for photos I want to share. I think AVIF is great for "a huge splash image for a web page that nobody is going to look at closely" but if you want something that looks like a pro photo I don't think it's better than WebP. People point out this example as "AVIF is great"

https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/demos/compare...

but I think it badly mangles the reflection on the left wing of the car and... it's those reflections that make sports cars look sexy. (I'll grant that the 'acceptable' JPEG has obvious artifacts whereas the 'acceptable' AVIF replaced a sexy reflection with a plausible but slighly dull replacement)

I store Raw + PSD with edits/history + whatever edited output format(s) I used.

just use jpegxl. works great on linux. Pressure software you use to use the proper formats

> HEIC is good, as long as you pinky promise to never ever leave Apple's ecosystem, ie HEIC sucks.

Not really true in my experience, I have no problems using it in Windows 11, Linux, or with my non-Apple non-Google cloud photos app.

The iPhone using it in an incredibly widespread way has made it a defacto standard.

If you're having trouble in Windows, I wonder if you're running Windows 11 or 10? Because 11 seems a lot better at supporting "modern things" considering that Microsoft has been neglecting Windows 10 for 3 years and is deprecating it this year.

That’s why I am confident LLMs won’t change as much as some may think: after 20+ years of search engines, some still can’t be bothered to do a simple search. (Either that or you’re trolling, I can’t decide I have to say.) Hence, we can wait another 20 years and some will still not use LLMs for everyday questions.

To answer your (false?) question, there’s a long list of benefits, but I’d say HDR and storage efficiency are the two big ones I can think of. The storage efficiency especially is massive, especially with large images.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44298656

You might be getting 100 Mbps to your smartphone; many people – yes, even within the United States – struggle to attain a quarter of that.

transparancy? hdr? proper support for lossless? theres many things lacking in jpeg

Exactly! It’s like asking why we still use wheels when hovercrafts exist.

If humans are still around in a thousand years they’ll be using jpegs and they’ll still be using them a thousand years after that. When things work they have pernicious tendency to stick around.

This is true, but there are limits. It's a little bit like DEFLAT. Sure, very advanced compressors like Zopfi exist which can get better compression ratios. But then, there's also just Zstd which will get a better compression ratio and compression speed trivially.

I guess you're thinking of jpegli? Do you know how big a difference this actually makes?

WebP seems pretty widely supported to me - on Windows at least, Explorer shows thumbnails for them, Paint can open them, other editors like Paint.NET have built-in support... I haven't come across software that doesn't support WebP for a while.

Case in point, DaVinci Resolve. Incredibly popular with people creating videos for YouTube and TikTok, still doesn't support webp in 2025.

This becomes an issue if you're creating content about trending topics, since lots of marketing sites love using webp for every image.

if I want to even download webp and look at the file I need to convert it. barely functional in basic image galleries outside of mobile?

Also missing from popular browsers is support for the new JPEG XL format.

They're just for different jobs.

JPEG is lossy, in ways that were initially optimized for photographs. The details it loses are often not details photographs are good at providing in the first place. As the upside for losing some data, it gets to pick the data it gets to compress, and it chooses it in such a way as to minimize the size of the compressed data.

PNG is a lossless format. It's practically mandatory when you need 100% fidelity, as with icons or other graphics that are intended to have high contrast in small areas. It's able to optimize large areas of the same color very well, but suffers when colors change rapidly. It's especially unsuitable for photographs, as sensor noise (or film grain, if the source was film) create subtle color variations that are very difficult for it to encode efficiently.

You basically never have a situation where either one is appropriate. They are for different things, and should be used as such.

PNGs for line art and text, JPEGs for photorealistic images.

> When I came up in the IE era

In the IE era I recall, the battle was between GIF and JPEG because IE supported alphatransparent PNGs very poorly :)

> if I recall correctly JPEG as a format can encode an image with a higher fidelity than PNG

The other way around: JPEGs are “lossy” – they throw away visual information to save file size. PNGs, on the other hand, are “lossless”, and decode back to exactly the same pixels that were fed into the encoder.

They're different beasts.

JPEGS are great for photographs, where lossy compression is acceptable.

PNGs can have transparency and lossless compression, so they're great for things like rasterized vector graphics, UI-element parts of a web page, etc.

It depends on the use case.

For archival purposes, where you care about not losing details is more important than image size, PNG is better (though often TIFF is used for that use case). For images with large blocks of solid colors and sharp edges (text, line drawings), PNG is arguable better (though JPEG can be acceptable if you're careful with quality settings). If you need alpha support, go for PNG since JPEG doesn't support that.

For photograph-like images, where image size is important, JPEG is preferred over PNG.

PNG should be used for some types of graphics, like whenever you have big areas of solid color (like logos) or any time you need translucency / transparency. Although, nowadays you can and should use SVG in most of those cases.

JPEG should be used for everything else.

JPEG and PNG don't work the same way. JPEG is lossy - it removes information from the original image, and PNG is lossless. For distribution, like on a website, with JPEG you can compress the image much more than PNG without the users noticing IF the image is photographic. If the JPEG represents a drawing, a screenshot, or contains labels, the lossy compression will be noticeable and PNG is much more appropriate. To keep as master for further modifications and compressions, keeping an image in JPEG format is a bad idea, again because JPEG is lossy. You can't ever encode an image with higher fidelity in JPEG vs PNG but both are useful.

> (if I recall correctly JPEG as a format can encode an image with a higher fidelity than PNG, at least in some circumstances)~

PNG is a lossless format, so I don't think that's possible, unless there's some specific feature that is not available in PNG.

> if I recall correctly JPEG as a format can encode an image with a higher fidelity than PNG, at least in some circumstances

24-bit color PNGs are lossless, to the extent that the input image is encodable in 24 bits of RGB (which is pretty much everything that's not HDR). There's no higher fidelity available for normal input images. If file size limits would force palettized PNGs, it's quite possible for a JPEG at the same file size to have higher fidelity (since it makes a different set of trade-offs, keeping color resolution but giving up spatial resolution instead); but this isn't really a common or particularly valid comparison in the PNG era, was more of an issue when comparing to GIFs.

tl;dr: Nope, PNG is perfect. JPEG can approach perfect, but never get there. Comparison is only interesting with external (e.g. file size) constraints.

The lack of support makes me suspicious of it. If even Google Docs finds it too difficult to prioritize webp support, idk if there's some hidden problem with ease of implementation.

As an enduser, I hate, hate, hate webp, because I cant' easily use the images in a wide range of ways.

Maybe it's vaguely more flexible and compresses well. I don't care. If someone uses it, I despise them.

Yep. I feel like we largely _have_ moved on from MP3. The people still using it are a small number of non-technical users that are handling audio manually just a little bit. Those not doing that at all have been transparently moved to something else, and anyone who is technical or managing a lot of audio will also choose something else if they can.

There will always be a huge body of preexisting MP3, though, so support isn't going anywhere. It'll probably never be "dead".

Same story for video, really. MPEG-2 isn't popular anymore but no end of support in sight.

I do handle files myself, but almost nothing keeps me on MP3. The only time I've even seen an MP3 in the past few years was when trying to get music into an old car system, which also sucked so much (e.g. shuffle feature with replacement) that I went back to just using the aux.

The Western World perspective on this platform generates quite funny statements sometimes. Outside of it, mp3 is still quite popular and normal.

Even within the Western World, there are many people who like to own their digital music.