If you have ever wondered why we are still using jpeg, this showed up in one of my morning's e-mail messages:

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

The author works for Google, who has some skin in this game, it's kinda long but very informative and well worth your time. The article has a link to "Smoosh," which, if you aren't already aware, is an amazingly useful tool.

Of historical note, jpeg's inventors back in 1988 tried to pull a Dauguerre with it. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented a photographic process in 1839 that he thought might eventually be useful. Rather than patent it, he made it open-source in exchange for a sinecure from France.

Jpeg started out open source, but a patent troll tried to pull a Trump in the patent-troll court of East Texas until they ran into a whole bunch of better lawyers. It was worth a try, look what happened with the Donald (and to us).

<<<Forgent Networks announced today (Apr 23, 2004) that its subsidiary, Compression Labs, has initiated litigation against 31 companies for infringement of U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 -- the so-called '672 compression patent -- in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division.>>>

Thanks for that. It's fascinating.

I didn't find any information about 'Smoosh', and am wondering whether 'Squoosh' (https://squoosh-desktop.now.sh/) was meant. If not, it would be helpful to have a link to information about the 'Smoosh' tool.

Compression algorithms undoubtedly have uses other than for web pages. For web pages I considered using .webp images until I found that IE 11 didn't support them, and it wasn't clear how long it would be until IE 11 could be completely ignored: that's a matter that I suspect needs to be judged by reference to one's target audience.

It will also be interesting to see what happens regarding speed of display for the person looking at the web page. Perhaps the extra CPU cycles required by the browser to interpret a highly compressed image could reduce the benefit for web designers.

Frank

Hi Frank
the link to "Squoosh" page is https://squoosh.app/ Its fairly logical and easy to use and
It's pretty good at compressing images,(except PNG) the only problem is that Site Designer doesn't support the "avif" format yet.
That would have to be applied after export, along with the additional linking etc to the "picture" thingy for browsers that don't yet support it, which can be complicated especially for those who don't know yet how to do it. so at the moment, it's just good for optimising to the "Mozbrowser" option which is quite a saving even from a photoshop optimised image without loss of image quality and works fine on all the browsers I have tested it on.
there is for me a clearly visible improvement on page loading (especially with my slow internet (still around 36 kps).
I think that keeping a close eye on developments for this thingy, is worth it for as & when or if it becomes fully available.

I've also read this with interest. It seems that at the time being, only Chrome supports it (unless my other browsers are not fully updated). Also, we need to have the image editing software supporting it too. So far, Photoshop cannot open it.
As to SD, there will not be added support for .avif until it is commonly supported by all the major browsers.

It's pretty neat, especially for large images (jpeg) I took a sample of a large image 2500 px X 1300 px that I created I Photoshop started out at just under 900 kb after optimisation went down to 830 kb ( ish) onto "tinyjpg.com" first run knocked off 21% second run knocked off 2%. Onto squoosh ,,used the "mozbrowser" option it knocked off yet another 8% without ant discernable loss of detail and at full width (max 2500 px) on our smart TV looked really ok. I tested the new format thingy an it knocked off a massive 51% from the original Photoshop image, but as has been said not that much use at the moment

Have you done any tests with a .png with transparent background?

Thanks, Wayan, especially for the report on the speed of page loading.

I find that XnView MP, which I use as my general image viewer, includes AVIF in its batch-conversion format list. To get it to reduce file sizes, I had to play around with the conversion settings (the lossless setting increased file sizes). I've hardly used its conversion facility before, and have therefore still to learn the significance of the settings figures. XnView will also do some editing of .avif files.

Frank

Yes and I can't get it to work it always puts a black background to it.

Frank
Same applies with this app in some cases it actually increases file size.

My apologies, folks, I dropped the q for an m and squoosh became smoosh. Everyone seems to have figured it out, though. Here's a link to a "how to use it" site (link starts with https and ends with 2Dtime):
https://www.targetinternet.com/a-comple … al%2Dtime.

Jake Archibald states the obvious - nobody wants to either publish or access poor quality imagery. Google has some very good reasons for pushing avif and, also, the kind of power to induce browser publishers to get with the program. I see two things standing in the way. "Internet Explorer 11" and the tendency of some businesses to retain ancient technologies, and the speed of development. Somebody came up with avif and somebody else is working on something that will give acceptable quality in half the image file size.

Damned if I do and damned if I don't.

Hehe! You're probably right!