20 ms·

Not backwards compatible. We just add it to that nice cupboard "great advanced image formats we will forget about". Society doesn't need a new image format. I'

Not backwards compatible. We just add it to that nice cupboard "great advanced image formats we will forget about". Society doesn't need a new image format. I'd wager to say not any new multimedia format. Big corporate entites do, and have churning them out at a steady pace. Look at poor webp - a format pushed by the largest industry players - and the abysmal everyday use it gets, and the hate it generates.

michaelmior 1y ago
> and the abysmal everyday use it gets Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  My file manager can’t handle them but my browser can. Edit: and good luck uploading the format to the majority of webforms that aren’t faang.
  - debugnik 1y ago
    Not even Google supports webp uploads in many of their web apps, and it's their format.
    - chillingeffect 1y ago
      Could it be a lack of resources? Or some missing expertise? Maybe they could find some interns who are familiar with it? Maybe the entire world is so obsessed w AI, we don't even care about image formats anymore.
      - pixl97 1y ago
        Honestly this kind of stuff happens all the time in large companies. Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
        chillingeffect 1y ago
        Thank you for the nice response... in contrast to those I deserved downvoting. You'ee alright.
  - upcoming-sesame 1y ago
    If you are using an image optimization service like Imgix / Cloudflare Image Resizing then it doesn't really matter, image can be uploaded as any supported format and will be sent to the end user according to their "Accept" header
    - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
      if you’d like to go and implement that in all the millions of existing web apps, go ahead? Let’s also not forget the dependency mess that leaves in applications before we do though..
  - account42 1y ago
    Demand more from you file manager then.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
      Sure, ur then it’s my image viewer, my phones image viewer, the website I try and upload pictures to. This isn’t a problem you can solve by patching one application, and it’s not one the world as a whole cares about. Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them? In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
    Not all businesses are attempting to reach a market of "every internet user globally".
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Can the 5% view images at all? The number of web crawlers have exploded recently.
    - jdiff 1y ago
      Yes, but it's 2% that are still using browsers without full support for WebP according to caniuse, which takes its numbers from StatCounter. https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp Note that I'm looking at "all tracked," which excludes 2% "other" browsers in the data whose featureset is not known.
  - 0points 1y ago
    > 5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them? That's not how it works. The server declares what versions of media it has, and the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too. Example: <picture> <source srcset="a.webp" type="image/webp"> <img src="fallback.jpg"> </picture>
    - vbezhenar 1y ago
      This problem was solved by HTTP since forever. Client sends `Accept` header with supported formats and server selects the necessary content with corresponding `Content-Type` header. You don't need any HTML tags for it.
      - 1y ago
- Geezus_42 1y ago
  Great, so I can download it, but then I have to convert it to a different format before half my apps will be able to use it.
  - wltr 1y ago
    Maybe the issue is with your operating system then?
    - jdiff 1y ago
      App support has very little to do with the operating system. OSes by and large will preview it just fine.
      - dinkblam 1y ago
        on the contrary. on macOS apps don't have to support image (or movie) formats. it is done by the system and transparently handled by the APIs. apps automatically gain new formats when the system adds it.
        reaperducer 1y ago
        The unfortunate side effect of this convenience is that apps automatically lose image support when macOS chases to no longer support them, too. One example is Sony's SRF camera raw format. Programs like Photoshop and Affinity have to bring their own decoders where previously none were required.
        dspillett 1y ago
        And having to bring in support for formats that are deprecated by the OS, if they decide to keep supporting that format as there is sufficient demand from their users, is worse than having to bring in support for all formats rather than getting support from the OS? Having ask that in a slightly confrontational way, one of the reasons I started using VLC all those years ago, and still use it to this day, was having trouble with other media players that relied on OS support fail to work well (or at all) with some codecs, while VLC brought support for them, and their dog, built-in and reliable. Dragging your own format support libraries with you can be beneficial.
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  You can't even upload webp to instagram.
  - bastawhiz 1y ago
    Which makes sense for an app made for photos: why would you capture a photograph to disk in a format made for distributing on the web?
    - jdiff 1y ago
      Indeed, why might one upload a photo to the web in a format made for distributing images on the web?
      - bastawhiz 1y ago
        I could save my photos as BMPs like early digital cameras did but that doesn't make it practical or reasonable. My camera takes pictures as RAW or HEIF files. Why would I save my photos to a primarily lossy codec that's optimized and designed for distribution rather than preserving fidelity? We used to do this with JPEG, in fact. And that's why many pictures on Facebook from pre-2018 or so all have a distinctive grainy look. It's artifacts on top of artifacts. Storage on phones isn't tight anymore, we don't need to store photos in a format meant to minimize bytes at the expense of quality.
        jdiff 1y ago
        There's more on Instagram than photos. Lotta meme pages, lot of people just uploading random screenshots and photos they downloaded that have been turned over a million times. Heck, all it takes is someone downloading their own photo from SocialMediaX to reupload on SocialMediaY, or just uploading a the WebP that they exported for their website.
    - Sharlin 1y ago
      Instagram hasn't even been primarily or even secondarily about photos for a long time. Indeed trying to "just" upload a photo is made super inconvenient these days.
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  completely fails the second you want to do anything more than load it on a webpage Photoshop still won’t open it, MacOS preview opens it but then demands to convert it to tiff when you try to edit it
  - asgerhb 1y ago
    Maybe using VLC Media Player from an early age has left me with too high expectations. But if I have a program designed to view or edit a certain class of file, and it doesn't support a certain file format, I will blame that program.
  - account42 1y ago
    GIMP and Gwenview have supported webp (the latter via platform image plugins that add support to other applications as well) since before you encountered them online. Maybe choose better tools.
Etheryte 1y ago
I don't really think this is the case here. All major browsers already support the new spec for example. This isn't a case of oh we'll have support for it eventually, it's already there.
Hendrikto 1y ago
> Momentum built, and additional parties became interested. […] we had representation from […] Adobe, Apple, BBC, Comcast / NBCUniversal, Google, MovieLabs, and […] W3C > Many […] programs […] already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer... > Plus, you saw some broadcast companies in that list above. Behind the scenes, hardware and tooling are being updated to support the new PNG spec.
127 1y ago
There's a big issue that all old popular image formats are 8-bits. 10-bits or even 12-bits would help a lot with storing more information and maintaining editability.
- londons_explore 1y ago
  If adding more bits to an image format, please make it 'n bit'. Ie. the file could be 8 bit, it could be 10, it could be 12, it could be 60 bit! Whilst we're at it, please get rid of RGB and make it N channels too. Libraries can choose to render that into a 3 channel, 8 bit buffer for legacy applications - but the data will be there for CMYK or HDR, or depth maps, or transparency, or focus stacking, or any other future feature!
- Retr0id 1y ago
  PNG has supported 16-bits per channel since version 1.0 in 1998 (at least)
lioeters 1y ago
> Not backwards compatible They say it's technically compatible since older image decoders should recognize the PNG file is using a different compression algorithm than the default. > Many programs already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer... This is intentionally ignoring the fact that there are countless PNG decoders out in the wild, many using libpng the standard decoder last updated 6 years ago; and they will not be able to read the new PNG v2 files. They should have used a different file extension, PNG2, to distinguish this incompatible format. Otherwise, users will be confused why their newly saved PNG file cannot be read by certain existing programs.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ape4 1y ago
    The 50 4E 47 spells "PNG"
  - colejohnson66 1y ago
    Those are indeed the "magic" bytes of PNG. It's a very clever choice meant to ensure the transport layer didn't mess with it. To start, there's a byte with the upper bit set which ensures an "8-bit clean" transport. If it's stripped, it becomes a harmless tab. Then the literal "PNG" text so you can see it in a text editor. Then a CR-LF pair to check for CR-LF to LF translations. Then, a CTRL-Z to stop display on DOS-like systems. And finally, another LF to check for LF to CR-LF translations. It's a clever "magic" that basically ensures a binary transport layer. Things that mattered back in 1996. https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Rationale.html#R.PNG-file-signature https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Rationale.html#R...
    - account42 1y ago
Retr0id 1y ago
Which aspects are not backwards compatible? You'll never be able to faithfully represent an HDR image on a non-HDR system, but you'll still see an image.
- account42 1y ago
  The problem is when "HDR" images that would perfectly fit into the sRGB color space are not rendered correctly on non-HDR systems. This PNGv2 fails that which means it isn't really any more useful and one of the existing (and much better) HDR-supporting formats like JPEG-XL or the video codec based ones pushed by the big guys.
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    If your image fits in sRGB colour space then why not just use sRGB?
    - account42 1y ago
      Someone who is aware of this issue can do that. Someone who just uses the standard export might not notice that their files are not backwards compatible. It might also be that most of the image fits into sRGB but a few highlights do not - having the whole image washed out because of those is also not good.
      - Retr0id 1y ago
        Software tends to default to sRGB export, because it's the safe default.
LocalH 1y ago
I miss the days of old Amiga OS 3.x, where you had installable "DataTypes" that any program could make use of. If we had that, then all such programs could at least be updated to basic compatibility by simply updating the datatype.
- account42 1y ago
  All operating systems support some kind of shared libraries and plugin architecture.
dev_l1x_be 1y ago
> Look at poor webp What about it? "Lossless WebP is typically 26% smaller than PNG, while lossy WebP can be 25-34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality levels" This literally saves houndred of thousand of cost, bandwith, electricity every month on the internet. In fact, I strongly belive that this is one of the greatest contributions from Google to society just like ZSTD from Facebook. https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_study https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_study
- Timwi 1y ago
  I don't think the commenter you replied to disagrees with any of that. They were talking about poor rates of adoption, not its feature set.
  - dev_l1x_be 1y ago
    The biggest driver of adoption are features. "WebP is used by 16.7% of all websites. This means that while it's a popular image format, it's not yet the dominant format, with JPEG still holding the majority share at 73.0%, according to W3Techs. However, WebP offers significant advantages in terms of compression and file size, making it a preferred choice for many web developers. "
- poisonborz 1y ago
  Society wholeheartedly thanks Google for saving costs for Google
  - dev_l1x_be 1y ago
    It saved money for our company too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
  Those numbers are from Google. Third parties have not found WebP to be as good as Google claims.
- account42 1y ago
GuB-42 1y ago
There are some applications for a new image format, but I agree that what we have is generally good enough. We need good video formats however. Video makes up most of the global internet traffic, probably accounts for a good part of global storage capacity too. Even slightly better compression will have a massive impact.
ProgramMax 1y ago
It is very backwards compatible. I'm not sure why you thought that. We jumped through quite a lot of hoops to make sure old software will be able to display new images. They simply won't display them optimally. But for the most part, that would be because the old software wouldn't display images optimally anyway. So the limit was the software, not the format. What I mean by this is old software that treats everything as sRGB wouldn't correctly show a Display P3 image anyway. But we made sure it will still display the image as correctly as it could.
- account42 1y ago
  The sample HDR images don't show correctly in image viewers even though the colors used fit into the sRGB gamut (or at least have good approximations in there). That's not really backwards compatibility.

michaelmior 1y ago

> and the abysmal everyday use it gets Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.

hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
My file manager can’t handle them but my browser can. Edit: and good luck uploading the format to the majority of webforms that aren’t faang.
- debugnik 1y ago
  Not even Google supports webp uploads in many of their web apps, and it's their format.
  - chillingeffect 1y ago
    Could it be a lack of resources? Or some missing expertise? Maybe they could find some interns who are familiar with it? Maybe the entire world is so obsessed w AI, we don't even care about image formats anymore.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Honestly this kind of stuff happens all the time in large companies. Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
      - chillingeffect 1y ago
        Thank you for the nice response... in contrast to those I deserved downvoting. You'ee alright.
- upcoming-sesame 1y ago
  If you are using an image optimization service like Imgix / Cloudflare Image Resizing then it doesn't really matter, image can be uploaded as any supported format and will be sent to the end user according to their "Accept" header
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    if you’d like to go and implement that in all the millions of existing web apps, go ahead? Let’s also not forget the dependency mess that leaves in applications before we do though..
- account42 1y ago
  Demand more from you file manager then.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    Sure, ur then it’s my image viewer, my phones image viewer, the website I try and upload pictures to. This isn’t a problem you can solve by patching one application, and it’s not one the world as a whole cares about. Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
dotancohen 1y ago
5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them? In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
  Not all businesses are attempting to reach a market of "every internet user globally".
- bawolff 1y ago
  Can the 5% view images at all? The number of web crawlers have exploded recently.
  - jdiff 1y ago
    Yes, but it's 2% that are still using browsers without full support for WebP according to caniuse, which takes its numbers from StatCounter. https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp Note that I'm looking at "all tracked," which excludes 2% "other" browsers in the data whose featureset is not known.
- 0points 1y ago
  > 5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them? That's not how it works. The server declares what versions of media it has, and the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too. Example: <picture> <source srcset="a.webp" type="image/webp"> <img src="fallback.jpg"> </picture>
  - vbezhenar 1y ago
    This problem was solved by HTTP since forever. Client sends `Accept` header with supported formats and server selects the necessary content with corresponding `Content-Type` header. You don't need any HTML tags for it.
    - 1y ago
Geezus_42 1y ago
Great, so I can download it, but then I have to convert it to a different format before half my apps will be able to use it.
- wltr 1y ago
  Maybe the issue is with your operating system then?
  - jdiff 1y ago
    App support has very little to do with the operating system. OSes by and large will preview it just fine.
    - dinkblam 1y ago
      on the contrary. on macOS apps don't have to support image (or movie) formats. it is done by the system and transparently handled by the APIs. apps automatically gain new formats when the system adds it.
      - reaperducer 1y ago
        The unfortunate side effect of this convenience is that apps automatically lose image support when macOS chases to no longer support them, too. One example is Sony's SRF camera raw format. Programs like Photoshop and Affinity have to bring their own decoders where previously none were required.
        dspillett 1y ago
        And having to bring in support for formats that are deprecated by the OS, if they decide to keep supporting that format as there is sufficient demand from their users, is worse than having to bring in support for all formats rather than getting support from the OS? Having ask that in a slightly confrontational way, one of the reasons I started using VLC all those years ago, and still use it to this day, was having trouble with other media players that relied on OS support fail to work well (or at all) with some codecs, while VLC brought support for them, and their dog, built-in and reliable. Dragging your own format support libraries with you can be beneficial.
AlienRobot 1y ago
You can't even upload webp to instagram.
- bastawhiz 1y ago
  Which makes sense for an app made for photos: why would you capture a photograph to disk in a format made for distributing on the web?
  - jdiff 1y ago
    Indeed, why might one upload a photo to the web in a format made for distributing images on the web?
    - bastawhiz 1y ago
      I could save my photos as BMPs like early digital cameras did but that doesn't make it practical or reasonable. My camera takes pictures as RAW or HEIF files. Why would I save my photos to a primarily lossy codec that's optimized and designed for distribution rather than preserving fidelity? We used to do this with JPEG, in fact. And that's why many pictures on Facebook from pre-2018 or so all have a distinctive grainy look. It's artifacts on top of artifacts. Storage on phones isn't tight anymore, we don't need to store photos in a format meant to minimize bytes at the expense of quality.
      - jdiff 1y ago
        There's more on Instagram than photos. Lotta meme pages, lot of people just uploading random screenshots and photos they downloaded that have been turned over a million times. Heck, all it takes is someone downloading their own photo from SocialMediaX to reupload on SocialMediaY, or just uploading a the WebP that they exported for their website.
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    Instagram hasn't even been primarily or even secondarily about photos for a long time. Indeed trying to "just" upload a photo is made super inconvenient these days.
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
completely fails the second you want to do anything more than load it on a webpage Photoshop still won’t open it, MacOS preview opens it but then demands to convert it to tiff when you try to edit it
- asgerhb 1y ago
  Maybe using VLC Media Player from an early age has left me with too high expectations. But if I have a program designed to view or edit a certain class of file, and it doesn't support a certain file format, I will blame that program.
- account42 1y ago
  GIMP and Gwenview have supported webp (the latter via platform image plugins that add support to other applications as well) since before you encountered them online. Maybe choose better tools.

Etheryte 1y ago

I don't really think this is the case here. All major browsers already support the new spec for example. This isn't a case of oh we'll have support for it eventually, it's already there.

Hendrikto 1y ago

> Momentum built, and additional parties became interested. […] we had representation from […] Adobe, Apple, BBC, Comcast / NBCUniversal, Google, MovieLabs, and […] W3C > Many […] programs […] already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer... > Plus, you saw some broadcast companies in that list above. Behind the scenes, hardware and tooling are being updated to support the new PNG spec.

127 1y ago

There's a big issue that all old popular image formats are 8-bits. 10-bits or even 12-bits would help a lot with storing more information and maintaining editability.

londons_explore 1y ago
If adding more bits to an image format, please make it 'n bit'. Ie. the file could be 8 bit, it could be 10, it could be 12, it could be 60 bit! Whilst we're at it, please get rid of RGB and make it N channels too. Libraries can choose to render that into a 3 channel, 8 bit buffer for legacy applications - but the data will be there for CMYK or HDR, or depth maps, or transparency, or focus stacking, or any other future feature!
Retr0id 1y ago
PNG has supported 16-bits per channel since version 1.0 in 1998 (at least)

lioeters 1y ago

> Not backwards compatible They say it's technically compatible since older image decoders should recognize the PNG file is using a different compression algorithm than the default. > Many programs already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer... This is intentionally ignoring the fact that there are countless PNG decoders out in the wild, many using libpng the standard decoder last updated 6 years ago; and they will not be able to read the new PNG v2 files. They should have used a different file extension, PNG2, to distinguish this incompatible format. Otherwise, users will be confused why their newly saved PNG file cannot be read by certain existing programs.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ape4 1y ago
  The 50 4E 47 spells "PNG"
- colejohnson66 1y ago
  Those are indeed the "magic" bytes of PNG. It's a very clever choice meant to ensure the transport layer didn't mess with it. To start, there's a byte with the upper bit set which ensures an "8-bit clean" transport. If it's stripped, it becomes a harmless tab. Then the literal "PNG" text so you can see it in a text editor. Then a CR-LF pair to check for CR-LF to LF translations. Then, a CTRL-Z to stop display on DOS-like systems. And finally, another LF to check for LF to CR-LF translations. It's a clever "magic" that basically ensures a binary transport layer. Things that mattered back in 1996. https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Rationale.html#R.PNG-file-signature https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Rationale.html#R...
  - account42 1y ago

Retr0id 1y ago

Which aspects are not backwards compatible? You'll never be able to faithfully represent an HDR image on a non-HDR system, but you'll still see an image.

account42 1y ago
The problem is when "HDR" images that would perfectly fit into the sRGB color space are not rendered correctly on non-HDR systems. This PNGv2 fails that which means it isn't really any more useful and one of the existing (and much better) HDR-supporting formats like JPEG-XL or the video codec based ones pushed by the big guys.
- Retr0id 1y ago
  If your image fits in sRGB colour space then why not just use sRGB?
  - account42 1y ago
    Someone who is aware of this issue can do that. Someone who just uses the standard export might not notice that their files are not backwards compatible. It might also be that most of the image fits into sRGB but a few highlights do not - having the whole image washed out because of those is also not good.
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      Software tends to default to sRGB export, because it's the safe default.

LocalH 1y ago

I miss the days of old Amiga OS 3.x, where you had installable "DataTypes" that any program could make use of. If we had that, then all such programs could at least be updated to basic compatibility by simply updating the datatype.

account42 1y ago
All operating systems support some kind of shared libraries and plugin architecture.

dev_l1x_be 1y ago

> Look at poor webp What about it? "Lossless WebP is typically 26% smaller than PNG, while lossy WebP can be 25-34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality levels" This literally saves houndred of thousand of cost, bandwith, electricity every month on the internet. In fact, I strongly belive that this is one of the greatest contributions from Google to society just like ZSTD from Facebook. https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_study https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_study

Timwi 1y ago
I don't think the commenter you replied to disagrees with any of that. They were talking about poor rates of adoption, not its feature set.
- dev_l1x_be 1y ago
  The biggest driver of adoption are features. "WebP is used by 16.7% of all websites. This means that while it's a popular image format, it's not yet the dominant format, with JPEG still holding the majority share at 73.0%, according to W3Techs. However, WebP offers significant advantages in terms of compression and file size, making it a preferred choice for many web developers. "
poisonborz 1y ago
Society wholeheartedly thanks Google for saving costs for Google
- dev_l1x_be 1y ago
  It saved money for our company too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
Those numbers are from Google. Third parties have not found WebP to be as good as Google claims.
account42 1y ago

GuB-42 1y ago

There are some applications for a new image format, but I agree that what we have is generally good enough. We need good video formats however. Video makes up most of the global internet traffic, probably accounts for a good part of global storage capacity too. Even slightly better compression will have a massive impact.

ProgramMax 1y ago

It is very backwards compatible. I'm not sure why you thought that. We jumped through quite a lot of hoops to make sure old software will be able to display new images. They simply won't display them optimally. But for the most part, that would be because the old software wouldn't display images optimally anyway. So the limit was the software, not the format. What I mean by this is old software that treats everything as sRGB wouldn't correctly show a Display P3 image anyway. But we made sure it will still display the image as correctly as it could.

account42 1y ago
The sample HDR images don't show correctly in image viewers even though the colors used fit into the sRGB gamut (or at least have good approximations in there). That's not really backwards compatibility.