Comment by jaffathecake
24 days ago
Just to put some numbers to this, I looked at an image I recently took with my phone:
Original image (JPEG): 3072×4080, 2.6 MB. Transcoded to JPEG XL: 2.1 MB.
To display at 2x density on my web page, it would be 1598×2122.
Lossless JPEG XL: 2.5 MB. Web-quality JPEG XL: 93 kB. Web-quality AVIF: 70 kB.
It still seems worth it.
A 2.5 MB download just isn't a problem in 2026. I would far rather see the lossless image than save a few MB.
Try traveling abroad with a prepaid data SIM (or limited roaming data allowance).
Plenty of websites already have comically huge pointless images (often then scaled down to tiny sizes for display). No need to make the problem worse.
If you're on a train, or a congested area, even 100 kB is a problem.