Comment by Feathercrown
4 hours ago
"For non-photographic images, the argument that “they should be vector images” doesn't hold up because many images could be vector images but aren't, and they can't be vectorized perfectly. “The world should be different” is not a justifiable defense against optimizing for the way the world actually is."
This is a good paragraph. I see people forget to apply that last sentence all the time.
Agreed. JPG is the most popular format for photography. PNG, the lossless format is great for diagrams and stuff with sharp edges. It can be "compressed" via dithering and quantization.
GIF is there... because it will always be there because it's just a hit that will never go away. It's also lossless (when discounting colour depth).
The new formats are interesting webp, avif, JXL and so on.
Jpeg classic is the clear winner IMHO and will probably never be less relevant than the new fancier formats. JPG even does text and sharp edges, reds, and so on well if you tell your process to take into account chroma subsampling!
It's magic and it puts food on my table.
Gif is a weird one because it's silently been replaced while keeping the name around. Virtually every software using the term "gif" actually uses a h264/vp9 video with no sound.
Modern video formats are so much better that they are a no brainer to use while the word gif just got used to refer to looping video without sound rater than the literal gif image format.
Reminds me of when Imgur started trying to push changing gifs over to gifv, which were just mp4 with a strange new file extension. I didn't like their approach but it really was such an improvement on file size and quality.
Precisely. Kind of reminds me of "Hoover" or "Kleenex". Coca cola even. It has brand equity which means it's not going away any time soon.