JPG refuses to carry an alpha channel. When you convert a PNG (or WebP, or AVIF) with transparency to JPG, the transparent and partially-transparent pixels in your source need to land on something — and that something…
Despite being a technical relic of the 1980s, the GIF remains the undisputed language of the digital reaction. Its longevity is surprising given its origins: it was developed by CompuServe in 1987 to facilitate color…
The slowest part of converting an image to AVIF is the encode itself. The decoder side is fine — once a file is written, every modern browser displays it in single-digit milliseconds per megapixel, slower than JPEG but…
JPEG has been the default web image format for decades thanks to universal compatibility, but its compression model is dated and often produces bulky files or visible artifacts. WebP improved the tradeoff, and AVIF…
In 2017, Apple quietly flipped a switch on every iPhone, and the most popular camera in the world suddenly stopped producing JPEGs. There was no announcement and no request for permission; it was a silent format change…
Design teams often find themselves trapped in a cycle of repetitive questions when trying to save product photos. Determining whether an image is for a website or email, if it needs transparency, and which browsers it…
Saving a JPEG looks like a single step in a menu, but it is actually a five-stage pipeline: color-space conversion, chroma subsampling, a frequency transform, quantization, and entropy coding. The whole process runs in…
Some image formats hold more than one picture per file. Animations (GIF, animated WebP) and multi-page documents (TIFF) all fit that shape. The converter accepts them as inputs and routes them through three different…
One of the more persistent myths in digital imaging is that PNG always produces higher quality than JPEG. It's an easy mistake to make because PNG is lossless and JPEG is lossy, but for photographic content the…
Swapping a 340 KB PNG logo for a 3 KB SVG is a familiar moment during a site audit, and the size gap comes from a real difference in how the two formats represent an image. Vectors describe shapes with math; pixels…
WebP became the default web image format for most large sites without much fanfare. Adoption happened gradually across browsers, CDNs, and site builders over about a decade, and by the time most developers thought to…