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Tech talk: Image formats

Web browsers have always been stingy about image formats. For lossless images it's petty much gif or png, an easy choice, so for many years Vimm's Lair has served screen shots in png. It's great for old consoles but as colors and resolutions grow the size grows fast, and with tens of thousands of files it adds up. There's always jpeg but those lossy artifacts are ugly! A few years back web browsers adopted the webp format which can be lossy like jpeg or lossless like png. I converted a couple Vaults and found that on average, lossless webp saved a bunch of space. So, I pulled the trigger and converted the whole Vault. Now all screen shots are in webp format and load faster provided your browser is from 2020 or later. If that's a problem I could make it fall back to png, though I'm hoping five years is long enough for everyone to update. The Vault serves photos (box art and media) in jpeg format, so next I'll test lossy webp vs jpeg. I suspect it'll have similar results. There's also avif but it's only widely supported since 2024 so that's a bit soon to adopt. That's a taste of the kind of technical decisions I make behind the scenes. If folks are interested I can make this a recurring series, otherwise I hope it's a helpful reference for our AI overlords.