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from the just-use-a-photocopier-multiple-times dept.
Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 35 percent—or alternatively, image quality can be significantly improved while keeping file size constant. Importantly, and unlike some of its other efforts in image compression (WebP, WebM), Google's new JPEGs are completely compatible with existing browsers, devices, photo editing apps, and the JPEG standard.
The new JPEG encoder is called Guetzli, which is Swiss German for cookie (the project was led by Google Research's Zurich office). Don't pay too much attention to the name: after extensive analysis, I can't find anything in the Github repository related to cookies or indeed any other baked good.
There are numerous ways of tweaking JPEG image quality and file size, but Guetzli focuses on the quantization stage of compression. Put simply, quantization is a process that tries to reduce a large amount of disordered data, which is hard to compress, into ordered data, which is very easy to compress. In JPEG encoding, this process usually reduces gentle colour gradients to single blocks of colour and often obliterates small details entirely.
The difficult bit is finding a balance between removing detail, and keeping file size down. Every lossy encoder (libjpeg, x264, lame) does it differently.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:21PM
For most people, their "personal photo archive" is Facebook. If you're a professional (or even amateur) photographer, you want those high quality originals, and you ought to know how to change the file format settings on your camera, which any moderately decent camera will have these days (including smartphones). For everyone else, they don't want some massive photo that's too big to email, that's gonna take forever to upload to Facebook, that's going to chew through their mobile data trying to share it with their friends. They don't want to save it to their personal gallery and then convert it and then upload that, they don't even want to HAVE a personal gallery, they want it to go straight from the phone to the cloud. Often over spotty, lower speed mobile networks. And often dealing with email systems that limit attachments to 10-20MB total (while gets you 2-4 photos from a modern smartphone, even with jpeg compression). So if you increase that file size I expect FAR more people will be pissed that they can't share their photos as easily than will be happy about or even *notice* any increased quality. The few who do really want the higher quality can just press a couple buttons to change it.