RBTN003: JPEG vs MozJPEG vs JPEG2K vs JPEG-XL

JPEG (short for Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a common digital image format, known for it's lossy compression. This is the format most people are familiar with, and is widely used to share photos across the internet.

JPEG2K was created as the successor to JPEG (around the year 2000), and adds new features such as better compression, higher bit depth, support of transparency, and lossless encoding.

JPEG-XL is the most recent (standardized in 2021) incarnation, and is expected to last a long time. It supports both lossy and lossless compression. JPEG-XL continues on the improvements from previous versions of JPEG, and is supported in the major browsers these days. It’s a relatively newer format, which you can find more info about from here: https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/

Retrobatch 2 supports all three of these formats for both reading and writing.

Retrobatch also supports two different encoders for the standard JPEG format: an Apple provided "Image IO" encoder, as well as MozJPEG from the Mozilla foundation whose goal is to "provide a production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders".

If you’re not sure which one to pick, stick with JPEG or MozJPEG.

If you don't know wether to pick between JPEG and MozJPEG, pick JPEG.