[bscphil]

"For high quality photography, I (and butteraugli) believe that JPEG is actually better than WebP."

That's interesting. Of course, the subjective part of that is one person's take, and the "objective" part of it is pointless because the whole point of Guetzli (the jpeg encoder) is to try to maximize the Butteraugli score, so saying that WebP gets a lower score is not significant.

Personally, WebP looks a lot better to me in the direct tests of equal file size that I've seen. It even looks better than Pik, which is Google's experimental successor to Jpeg that also uses Butteraugli.

And it would be odd, to say the least, if a codec from the early nineties could beat a modern one on Intra-frame coding, which has been a subject of immense research over the years.

Take a look at some of these for yourself. https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats-comparison/

[lstamour]

Like MP3 encoders, JPEG encoders have only gotten better over the years, perhaps they’ve fewer bugs or compromises for compression? Also, there are newer standards for JPEG including JPEG2000 and JPEG XR, etc. Plus many other alternatives: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...

So my advice is encode in multiple formats to achieve the broadest browser support and the best image quality/size trade off that you’re willing to allow. That said... it does sort of bug me that every couple years we have to revisit which codecs we’re using because the implementations keep marching on...