LillyPip

Perhaps. This isn’t the best forum for this, either.

Rule of thumb: save as png.

Right. We agree that’s a rather gruelling experience you shouldn’t have had to have in an ideal world.

I’m saying that’s a problem that can and should be solved by the technology itself. Future users shouldn’t even have to think about that, and I say that from the position of knowing far too much about it.

It’s absolutely exhausting, as a user, to have to keep that level of knowledge current every several years for decades, and there’s no reason we should have to anymore. The technology is advanced enough to take more burdens off its users.

Sorry for the rant, but the image format debate exemplifies this.

Okay, inasmuch as everyone in this thread not understanding the difference between png and jpg is a marketing problem.

Instead of thinking it’s a user issue, it should be up to developers to make sure the user doesn’t have to care. I promise they won’t either way.

It’s a development problem.

e: extra word

That’s fair. Thank you for making that distinction.

e: It’s still bad for the user, though.

No, everyone knows these formats, just not what they’re for. Like people use jpg for everything when they should be using png. Like in this entire discussion.

I don’t miss Reddit. XD

You shouldn’t have to care, honestly. It should just work.

I had to learn all this because I was chief designer for one of the main companies that came up with these formats, but nobody else should have to care about this shit. The fact that this is a post in 2023* makes me feel like we’ve failed.

You shouldn’t even have to think about this.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to be condescending. Glad it made you laugh, tho.

I’m only trying to educate because most people seem to think everything should be a jpg or think it’s all magic (this thread is full of that), and this is one of the few topics I know quite a lot about.

Didn’t mean to offend.

e: rereading my last comment, I see what you mean. What I meant was it takes understanding of several scientific papers detailing the algorithms (which took me a bit to understand), and I can’t easily condense that into a comment online. Sorry for how that came across.

No it doesn’t.

This may be hard to understand if you don’t know how it works, but nothing is being converted. It’s like opening a .docx in a .txt editor. It will show you the data it can, and there’s lots of crossover in image formats.

Sorry, I can’t explain it better without getting more technical than you can probably understand, but it’s not converting anything.

You can ‘change’ the extension of any file whose innards match the file type you’re ‘changing’ it to.

Under the hood, nothing changes. Windows opens it anyway because it reads the actual file data and basically assumes you must be an idiot.

e: change the file extension of a jpg to txt. Windows shrugs and says okay, if that’s what you really want, and shows you the code. Knock yourself out, it says, I’ll show you what I can, but it doesn’t convert the file.

Jpg has some advantages with photos, because it takes advantage of pixel fuzzing which isn’t visually noticeable in photos and can contribute greatly to higher compression.
It’s objectively terrible for everything else, though (because of the pixel fuzzing).

That’s not how conversion works.

Web images should be converted to png, then, never jpg (unless they’re actual photos).