JPEG may disappear very soon. The most common image format in history
Nowadays, you can find a wide range of image formats online, such as PNG, WebP, GIF, or BMP. However, the most widely viewed and used format in photographs and digital content is JPEG, also known as JPG.
It was released in the early nineties and was designed with a key feature that made it very popular: pressure. This technique reduces the file size by deleting information from the image that the human eye does not theoretically see.
Thanks to this, JPEG takes up much less space than other uncompressed formats, which was necessary in the early days of the Internet, when bandwidth and storage space were limited.
But despite its advantages, it has limitations, such as image quality. This means that the more you reduce the file size, the greater the quality loss significantly, which can ruin the image you want to keep clear and detailed. This is one of the main reasons why JPEG, after more than 30 years, may be about to expire.
- Custom image format to replace JPEG
There are currently more efficient image formats that are able to maintain visual quality without increasing the file size too much. Among them, AVIF and JPEG XL stand out, two formats set to replace JPEG in the near future.
AVIF is a format developed by Alliance for Open Media with the support of Google and is designed to be compatible with Chromium-based browsers, such as Chrome and Microsoft Edge, giving it a significant advantage in terms of acceptance and visibility on the web.
AVIF allows image compression with high efficiency without significant loss of quality, which means you can get high-resolution images with good color reproduction in much smaller files than JPEG files.
On the other hand, JPEG XL is presented as a logical successor to JPEG, as it maintains a compatible file structure, but with significant improvements in compression and image quality. You can reduce the image without worrying about its quality.
In addition, it is capable of handling much higher resolution and supports greater color depth, making it a more versatile and future-proof format. However, despite its technical superiority, JPEG XL does not have the same browser support as AVIF.
Why are formats for new photos better? Because they use more modern compression algorithms, which allow reducing the size of images without losing quality. This translates into savings in storage space and less data consumption when uploading images to the Internet.
Although JPEG was and still is the most popular image format in history, it is possible that in the coming years we will see its replacement with more modern alternatives that better adapt to the current requirements of quality on the web.