Image Format Wars

Some people don't know that JPEG's comment field can contain GPS coordinates.

There's a spec called Exif. Date taken, camera model, aperture, shutter speed. And GPS coordinates. Take a photo, upload it to social media, and your home's latitude and longitude go public to the entire world. Most services now strip Exif on upload. They didn't used to. Stalking incidents resulted. A convenient spec became a vulnerability. Textbook case.

The history of image formats is long. GIF appeared in 1987. Only 256 colors, but it could animate. Unisys sued over the LZW compression patent. PNG was born. PNG gave you full color and transparency but no animation. APNG tried to fix that. It never caught on. Animated GIF survived after all. The patent expired. I remember raising a glass with our designer when it did.

JPEG is strong for photographs. Lossy compression shrinks file size dramatically. But each save degrades the image. Save repeatedly and quality degrades. PNG is lossless — no degradation — but the files are large. You just had to choose by use case.

In the flip-phone era, carriers stuffed a copy-protection flag into JPEG's comment field. A mechanism carriers implemented for copyright protection. Download a wallpaper and you couldn't transfer it to another handset. Try sending it over infrared — blocked. Early DRM, looking back. We were paying for digital content that vanished when you switched phones.

When Google shipped WebP, it felt like everything would finally unify. Photos, illustrations, transparency, animation — one format to cover it all. Smaller than JPEG. But browser support dragged. IE wouldn't support WebP. IE died, and at last WebP became usable.

AVIF, the next standard, is waiting. The format wars won't end. But JPEG will remain. Probably long after every one of us has retired.