• LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Jpg for photos, png for everything else.

    It’s an easy rule of thumb, it hurts that 20 years of repeating it seems to have had zero effect.

    Maybe this helps: Jpg fucks up your image, and png doesn’t.

    Or: jpg is lossy, png is lossless.

    Or: It’s better to save photos as png than cartoons as jpg.

    Seriously, I hope some of this breaks through because deep fried images are so fucking unnecessary.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
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      6 months ago

      I hear WebP can often offer much better compression than PNG in lossless mode so that could be an alternative.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        Could be. I’m not as familiar with that format – a major strength of png is that anything can open and view it properly. It’s been a standard for decades, so it has universal compatibility.

        e: I’m not going to look into that specific format (I stopped caring about the inner workings of file formats like 15 years ago when I stopped getting paid to care), but I think I could bet you that webp is a document hierarchy wrapper on png, jpg, gif, mpeg, etc, ad inf.

        I had to exit this comment and look again because I couldn’t remember if you’d said webm or webx or webp or whatever. The last I knew, that’s not a file format but a codepage (nowadays, that’s usually a cheap wrapper over code they found and repackaged).

        That’s massively simplified, but if you’re asking that in this thread, I’m worried people are being sold a difference that doesn’t exist.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        Slightly larger file size, which mattered in like 2002, but it’s only a few mb, which doesn’t matter at all now.

        e: if you’re a professional photographer and saving stupidly high resolution images by the thousands, you’ll want to use jpg, but in that case, you’ll understand why.