Google didn’t kill JPEG XL. It might have set browser support back some, but there’s still a place for JPEG XL to take over.
All the modern video-derived formats (webp, heif/heic, avif) tend to be optimized for screen resolutions. But for print photography (including just plain old regular photography that wants to keep the option open of maybe printing some of the images eventually), the higher resolutions and higher quality stretches the limits of where those codecs actually perform well (in terms of file sizes, perceived quality, computational power of coding or decoding).
JPEG XL knocks the other modern images out of the water at those print resolutions and color spaces and quality. It’s not just for photography, either: medical imaging, archiving, printing, etc., all use much higher resolutions that what is supported on any screen.
And perhaps most importantly for future support, the iPhone now supports taking images in JPEG XL. If that becomes a dominant format for photographic workflows, to replace stuff like DNG and other raw formats, browser support won’t hold back the format’s adoption.
Thanks for the iPhone hint! Do you happen to know or have an idea why Apple chose to offer JPEG XL only as ProRaw format? For “normal” photo capture, they still use HEIC only.
I think HEIC plays friendly for how they store live photos: a container that has both a still image and a video of the surrounding time context. HEIC for the still photo and HEVC for the video probably optimizes the hardware acceleration for fast, low power processing of both parts of the data, and allows for a higher quality extraction of an alternative still photo from a different part of the video.
And maybe they want to have more third party support in place before they set JXL as a default. All the power and space savings in the world on capture might not mean as much if the phone has to do the work of exporting a JPEG or HEIC for each time that file interfaces with an app or the browser or whatever.
Oh wow, Mozilla reconsidered JXL support. They said no after Google pulled out, but “now” (well, since an entire year ago) they’re at half a yes again.
Glad to hear JPEG-XL is still making its way. It deserves to become the most widespread image format.
Regarding web usage after the Google situation:
I do disagree about AV1. Its AVIF image format spinoff is very good. Often better quality or smaller file size than webp, and has browser support as good as webp nowadays. And of course,
I work on a lot of web projects, and I used to serve webp and AVIF for a while (based on the browser’s HTTP Accept header). Recently, I decommissioned all webp handling and serving code.
Forget webp. AVIF is the image format.
(Especially after Google killed JPEG-XL.)
Google didn’t kill JPEG XL. It might have set browser support back some, but there’s still a place for JPEG XL to take over.
All the modern video-derived formats (webp, heif/heic, avif) tend to be optimized for screen resolutions. But for print photography (including just plain old regular photography that wants to keep the option open of maybe printing some of the images eventually), the higher resolutions and higher quality stretches the limits of where those codecs actually perform well (in terms of file sizes, perceived quality, computational power of coding or decoding).
JPEG XL knocks the other modern images out of the water at those print resolutions and color spaces and quality. It’s not just for photography, either: medical imaging, archiving, printing, etc., all use much higher resolutions that what is supported on any screen.
And perhaps most importantly for future support, the iPhone now supports taking images in JPEG XL. If that becomes a dominant format for photographic workflows, to replace stuff like DNG and other raw formats, browser support won’t hold back the format’s adoption.
Thanks for the iPhone hint! Do you happen to know or have an idea why Apple chose to offer JPEG XL only as ProRaw format? For “normal” photo capture, they still use HEIC only.
I think HEIC plays friendly for how they store live photos: a container that has both a still image and a video of the surrounding time context. HEIC for the still photo and HEVC for the video probably optimizes the hardware acceleration for fast, low power processing of both parts of the data, and allows for a higher quality extraction of an alternative still photo from a different part of the video.
And maybe they want to have more third party support in place before they set JXL as a default. All the power and space savings in the world on capture might not mean as much if the phone has to do the work of exporting a JPEG or HEIC for each time that file interfaces with an app or the browser or whatever.
Makes sense. Thanks for your knowledgeable response!
I will forever support JPEGXL. AV1 is a good video codec, not that good for imgaes.
Google may have killed it on the web but it’s slowly gaining support in other places where webp never had any
Oh wow, Mozilla reconsidered JXL support. They said no after Google pulled out, but “now” (well, since an entire year ago) they’re at half a yes again.
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064
https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs
Edit: neat, it has recently landed in the Firefox codebase: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D263393
Still behind a flag, but Apple seems to have decided for JXL, and Mozilla seems to have gotten their mind made up and following suit.
Glad to hear JPEG-XL is still making its way. It deserves to become the most widespread image format.
Regarding web usage after the Google situation:
I do disagree about AV1. Its AVIF image format spinoff is very good. Often better quality or smaller file size than webp, and has browser support as good as webp nowadays. And of course,
I work on a lot of web projects, and I used to serve webp and AVIF for a while (based on the browser’s HTTP
Acceptheader). Recently, I decommissioned all webp handling and serving code.See https://caniuse.com/?search=image+format. You can serve an AVIF for every requested JPEG or PNG file.
The image format… unless your image is greater than 4K resolution.
For all I know, the 4K thing is misinformation.
According to Wikipedia, it’s 8K resolution for the baseline profile. That’s still bad.
Better than PNG?