Saturday, October 10, 2026

Web Image File Formats

 

This photograph of our hallway Buddha is about 800x110px, and has been saved in .JPG format from Affinity 3 with a compression ratio of 66%.

It is roughly 164 KB. 

This is my standard web image format.


 This is the same photograph, though post-processed at a later date, so the cropping and tones are not identical.

This one is again saved from Affinity 3, this time in .WEBP in its high-quality lossy format.

This one is only 104 KB, so already a decent bandwidth saving.


 Here we have another .WEBP image, also exported from Affinity 3, this time in its lossy low-quality format.

It's definitely softer than the high-quality image, but on the other hand it's only 22 KB, which is a pretty massive saving.

 

 

I've been resistant to using .WEBP as my default image file format for web display, but I think I'll have to change my mind.

There are a couple of other options coming up: .AVIF and JPEG-XL, both of which are reputed to give benefits over .WEBP, but neither of those formats is in common usage just yet. 

I can create JPEG-XL from Affinity, though with a pretty restricted range of options, but I can't create AVIF at all, and even if I could there's a good chance that they wouldn't display in a browser just yet. Soon though.