iPhone 16 could let you shoot in JPEG-XL

[nyanpasu64]

I want a return to an enforced norm of different extensions for lossy and lossless files. With the adoption of WebP, I've repeatedly encountered shady CDNs substituting in lossy .webp files in place of lossless .png files, in a way you can't tell by the filetype alone when saving a file (whereas you could tell when saving a .png URL but get a .jpg file instead). I fear the same will happen with .jxl files.

[_answ]

The lossy vs lossless distinction loses its meaning in the absence of provenance. You can compress a bitmap into a .jpg q=1, and then save it as a .png. The .png is technically lossless, but that clearly doesn't tell much about the image quality. Conversely, many cameras shoot JPEG as the source format. The .jpg is, in effect, the master copy from which the loss is measured (obviously there are losses from the sensor data, but still).

[vinkelhake]

It wouldn't be effective in practice. There are tools like pngquant that does lossy compression of png. That shady CDN could just as easily recompress png files.

https://pngquant.org/

[londons_explore]

In the world of the web, it is the mime type, not the extension, which tells you the format.

It's kinda just lousy OS's which aren't correctly storing the mime type for each file.

[ksec]

I voiced the exact same thing for many years and unfortunately the author of jxl doesn't agree with that. I wish the same as well we could just tell by file type.

[catoc]

tinypng.com compresses ‘lossless’ .pngs

[jl6]

Seems to be just a rumor, but one that I hope is true. I also hope they use it as an opportunity to finally fix the longstanding ugly wart of having Live Photos be a separate .MOV file sitting alongside the HEIC file. JPEG XL is a container format so it should be possible to include the MOV as a separate box alongside the jxlc data and exif metadata. Of course, HEIF had the same capability and they still didn’t use it.

[pretext-1]

Technically they could already do this as JPEG allows adding arbitrary data to the file after the image data. ZIP files allow arbitrary data BEFORE the image data, therefore a file can be a valid JPEG and ZIP at the same time. So all you need to do is to put the MOV into a ZIP and append that to the image file, done. Live Photos in a single file!

Btw., you can abuse the „unlimited“ „free“ photos storage that comes with Amazon Prime that way.

[AdamJacobMuller]

is JPEG-XL really an upgrade over HEIC?

[ianburrell]

In addition to the compression, JPEG-XL has some nice features that make it better image format. It also does lossless compression. It does color spaces.

One cool feature is that can losslessly convert JPEG into JPEG-XL. And back to JPEG. I can't tell if this applies to all or only converted ones, but it might make good source format and convert to JPEG on export.

[ksec]

For images at low bit per pixel, HEIC is actually quite a bit better than JPEG-XL current encoder. I wouldn't say really an upgrade technically speaking, I would put them on same level with XL have some additional interesting feature.

But considering getting HEIC included in other system seems to be difficult due to patents or other reasons. JPEG-XL seems to be the best middle ground in everything.

I am still hoping there could be additional work on JXL in terms of low bit per pixel improvement and encoding / decoding resource usage. Especially in the lossless front.

[modeless]

Yes, the progressive rendering is really cool, lossless mode is better, lossless recompression of JPEGs is a cool feature, it's faster, it supports larger images (without tiling) with more channels and higher bit depths.

[jerryX]

HEIC is paid, inferior, unpopular ... while JPEG XL is finally the long term replacement of ~30 year old JPEG.

[cornstalks]

Yes, not being HEVC is a huge plus given HEVC’s patent drama/prices

And quality wise, JPEG XL is definitely better

[Pikamander2]

Compared to the stark differences between BMP/JPG/PNG/GIF, there's a ton of overlap between WEBP/HEIC/AVIF/JPEGXL.

Naturally, some types of images tend to compress better with some formats than others, and then you may have to take into account things like the desired quality level, encoding time, etc.

https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_deth...

Realistically, any of those four new formats would be fine for 99% of the images that exist, but it would still be nice for every browser to support them all so that web developers can choose their favorite format.

Although, on the flip side, the drawback of having so many formats floating around is that software developers have to spend more time supporting it all. Even trillion dollar companies like Microsoft are seemingly in no rush to make sure that formats like WebP are as well integrated into their software as JPG/PNG were.

[sunflowerfly]

HEIC was designed for motion pictures where smoothing at the cost of detail is acceptable. From an image detail standpoint, yes.

[aidenn0]

Yes.

[MBCook]

Section in the article: “The iPhone 16 family could let you shoot in JPEG-XL”

I’m with you. No normal person is waiting for this. Are any techies? Like maybe 2?

The article says the JPEG would be a third the size they are now. OK. That’s nice.

But only 12.5% of Internet users can seem ‘em. All of ‘em Apple users.

https://caniuse.com/?search=jpeg-xl

So what’s the point? Just use HEIC. It’s supported by the exact same browsers. All Safari and nothing else.

This seems like a really sketchy rumor to me.

[486sx33]

Interestingly, when visiting the JPEG-XL test page referenced in the article, everything renders but the animation at the bottom for JPEG-XL doesn’t move. The others do. iPhone 15 pro on safari

[jiggawatts]

In which case Google and Microsoft are sure to immediately cease any work on supporting this open format, just so that they can claim Apple is unfairly preventing interoperability.

[butz]

Good luck viewing those on Chrome.

[pornel]

24 megapixel almost-lossless photos dumped straight from the camera are too heavy to be used directly on the Web. They also have lots of metadata including GPS location, that people usually don't want to share.

In practice you'd want to resize it (HD is 2mpx, and 4K resolution is 8mpx), and recompress to quality suitable for viewing not editing (makes huge difference in file size).

The necessary recompression step makes the input format mostly irrelevant. The upside is that JPEG XL is free to use, so it's possible to legally write tooling using it without touching the mess of H.265 patents.

[pretext-1]

They might reconsider.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-JPEG-XL-Seconds

[guidedlight]

The JPEG-XL test page (linked in the article), works well.

https://jpegxl.info/test-page/

At the bottom of the page it has animation demonstration, that doesn’t appear to work on my iPhone 13 Pro.

Does JPEG-XL really include animation support?

[voisin]

Doesn’t animate on my iPhone 15 pro either.

[gardaani]

macOS 14 / Safari 17.6 shows static pics, but no animation.

Honestly, I wish all animated image formats would just die. They are an inefficient way to animate images, because they only use intra frames. H.264, H.265 or AV1 should be used for animations. Fortunately, Safari can display video files in <img> or CSS images, which makes all animated image formats unnecessary.

[chungy]

> Does JPEG-XL really include animation support?

Yes, it does. It's a limited sort of animation like GIFs were; JPEG XL is not derived from video codecs like WebP, AVIF, and HEIF are, where those formats include "animation" by really breaking out of being a subset and just being the regular intraframe video codec.

[slimsag]

All blank in Firefox :(

[taspeotis]

Works on my iPhone 15 Pro

iOS 17.6.1

[M-Valentino]

I want a phone that lets you shoot PNG

[The_Colonel]

Why? PNG is really a bad format for photos (simply was not designed for this use case)

JPEG-XL has a lossless mode if that's what you're after ...

[t-writescode]

PNG is designed for images that don't change colors between each pixel very often. That's how its compression algorithm works.

Images, by their nature, are far more fluid, which is why a FFT-based compression algorithm, like the one in jpegs, makes sense for photos.

[xnyan]

Unless you'll exclusively use it for pictures of text intended for web consumption, you don't.