Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

If you set the quality parameter to > 95% when creating a JPG from original picture, you won't be able to tell any differences between the PNG and the JPG, especially when the full width of the image is limited to max 720 pixels as it is on this website.

There is literally no reasons to prefer PNG over JPG in this specific scenario.



Sure there is. Storing, and sharing lossless images.

I find it amusing that you (and others) presume why some did a thing. Their motivations.

If you want something stored for historical reasons, shared by media, news, archive.org, png presents unvarnished stuff.

5, 10 years from now, people will scratch their head, and wonder why people cared about such tiny filesizes.

FLAC used to be only for extremists too.


I have nothing against storing and sharing lossless images. But do it efficiently if you're gonna do it. Showing 10+ images that each weight a lot is not efficient. Instead, show the compressed image on the website (as it's limited to 720 width anyways), and add a link to the original. Now everyone is pleased.

I downloaded the 1.png file and converted it to a JPG and also diffed the origianl PNG with the JPGs I generated (90% in quality and 80%).

- Original PNG: 51M

- 95% JPG: 13M

- 90% JPG: 9.4M

- 80% JPG + interlace + strip Plane: 4.7M

Comparing the new versions with the original via the PSNR metric (closer to 1 is better [more similar]):

- Original PNG vs Original PNG: 1 (obviously)

- Original PNG vs 95% JPG: 0.999465

- Original PNG vs 80% JPG: 0.998611

With other (shorter) words: There is no difference for the consumer (a website visitor) between the two, except one uses more resources (RAM + network) and takes longer to download and the other one doesn't.

For the archiver (which you seem to consider more than the website user) there is clearly a difference between lossless and lossy files. But those can be linked instead of rendered directly inline.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: