Announcing Guetzli: A New Open Source JPEG Encoder

[RickS]

Google has announced an encoder which is claimed to reduce JPEG file size substantially while maintaining image quality:

https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/announcing-guetzli-new-open-source-jpeg.html

I've had a bit of a play with it and I'm impressed so far. It took a high res mosaic down from 16.3MB to 11.6MB and still looked great even when pixel peeping. It did take a long time, though :)

Might be a way to improve IQ when file size is limited, e.g. IIS image attachments.

Cheers,
Rick.

[SimmoW]

Thanks for the heads up Rick, will check it out myself.

[sil]

sorry but, meh

didnt we go through this in the 90's when the web started. has never been much need except for storage space on floppies. I guess mobile phone web is driving this, faster delivery of bigger ads into all your apps. it'll calm down and i dont see much point in it for the general public these days.

[RickS]

No, not a big deal for the average person... but if you have a large astro image gallery or want to post an IIS attachment with the best possible quality it might be of interest.

Cheers,
Rick.

[sil]

I have tons of images and tons stored in fractal compression formats which solved the space and quality issues years ago and now I can't open any of them unless i use Windows 98. Also isnt this new jpg just doing what jpeg2000 promised that nobody really bothers with either? Or just use a jpeg stripper to remove all exif data and save a ton of space without the image data being touched which works great until you need to know the date or camera settings of a photo. speaking from experience. For Google it would be useful for web accelerators that don't perceptively effect web images and faster ad delivery to your apps and games. I would rather see a more robust lossless compression archival format with ongoing future support that the images can be retrieved. At least jpeg is fairly universal and good for its task plus its robust for data recovery where even partial data loss doesnt destroy the whole image unlike most image formats. Then there's PNG, its too early to dredge out my brain :) I do like some of the projects Google comes up with, not so much this one is all.

[RickS]

The whole point of using vanilla JPEG is that you're not relying on changing the whole world to support a new image format. That's a very hard thing to do unless you're offering some exciting new functionality rather than an incremental improvement. The other point is that it appears you get either a significant reduction in size or an improvement in quality at no cost if you're an image consumer. You don't have to give up the EXIF data.



I'll leave it to you to tell Google that you disagree with their priorities :D