Google Guetzli – a new open source JPEG encoder

It’s as much fun as seeing white dog hairs on the black couch. The smaller the images, of which the web is filled with, the faster websites will load on your machine. Do note, though, that Google does not intend to replace JPEG.

Hopefully, Google says that it has found the right solution for this conundrum.

Google has developed a new JPEG algorithm that shrinks file sizes by up to 35 percent. The idea is not to replace the popular method of lossy compression for digital images, but tweak its settings to decrease the likelihood of noticeable problems when files are squeezed.

Speed is everything on the internet, and as a general rule of thumb: the smaller the file, the faster it’ll load. Web pages have a ton of them. While this is a significant step forward, the real change will be seen when web folks and graphic designers employ it in their photographic content online. Compression works by tossing out information that we won’t notice is missing, and the objective of Butteraugli is to robotize testing of various compression settings. It aims to improve on existing JPEG encoders by introducing a highly optimised multi-stage compression process that can retain more detail than current algorithms.

The one major shortcoming with Guetzil, however, is that the algorithm takes significantly longer to create compressed images compared to now available methods. They validated their results in a separate study detailing tests of Butteraugli with actual people (PDF). According to the Verge, the tech giant claims that Guetzli images are of higher quality than similar and even larger JPEGs build with other methods. Say hello to Guetzli, an open-source JPEG encoder.

Google is not the just a sole company that is working on this approach.

The tool’s main job is to help Google itself. Uncompressed original on the left.

There’s no free lunch here, though. Smaller file sizes and better image quality? Wow! In English (thanks Ars Technica) that means Google’s algorithm is better at figuring out which colors to keep and which to toss during the “quantization” portion of JPEG compression. Fortunately, the new Google function, the Guetzli JPEG compressor, do not have such incompatibility issues.

WebP slashed file sizes by a quarter, but didn’t always interact well with image-editing software, with Photoshop requiring a plugin, or with other browsers, which didn’t all support the new file format.