BPG could be the next big thing
At this point in your digital life, you’ve saved hundreds, maybe thousands of photos to your hard drive or mobile device, and you might have had the problem of poor quality or low storage space and had to start deleting images.
French programmer, Fabrice Bellard, has developed a new image format that could cure this problem. The BPG (Better Portable Graphics) image format delivers the same image quality (or better, from what we’ve seen) as a JPEG file, claiming to be half the size.
A Mozilla study stated that HEVC (a video encoding standard) is superior to other technologies, so Bellard designed the BPG around a subset of those technologies.
As with anything new, adoption rates remain a mystery. It is so new that tools like Photoshop do not support them, and developers may buck the format (and rightly so), as they would have to adopt built-in support as unique Javascript code is required to load a .bpg image on a site or in an app. Anyone that owns a website knows that Javascript isn’t always the preferred option, even to save a little bit of storage space on the bloated servers of the world.
There are advantages and disadvantages of this new format and it will likely be polarizing if it takes off. Take a look at some interactive image samples that pit JPEG up against BPG, or keep scrolling for some before and after shots (featuring BPG as the cleaned up version).
Click any image to enlarge:
