Guess what; GIF, JPEG and PNG have remained unchanged – all have received incremental improvements. However as nowadays technology advances, we discover more efficient approaches, which are not always compatible with the standards we defined back in the 1980s.

Here are the 3 image formats every designer needs to know about…

WebP: Based on technology first released in 2008, it was announced by Google as an open standard in 2010 for lossy optimisation of true-colour images. Albeit it appears similar to JPEG for this particular reason but it also promises alpha transparency, lossless optimisation and even animation.

JPEG 2000: This is somewhat similar to WebP in terms of lossy compression, alpha transparency and performing better than JPEG at low qualities. But it typically differs in its support of progressive loading. It is supported on Safari and iOS and delivers a typical compression gain over JPEG of around 20 per cent.

JPEG Extended Range (JPEG XR): Typically JPEG XR is a former Microsoft proprietary format. It is the new generation of JPEG which offers better compression at higher levels of quality, but also alpha transparency and more efficient decoding via tile regions.

In a nutshell there is no universal image format that is best for all scenarios. Every type of image format has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Important Image Formats for Designers