I saw this post today https://cohost.org/Space-Reptile/post/830174-fun-fact-windows-7 ad that made me wanna talk about it.
I think folks are giving too much rep to webp. You have those who worship it and those who say it's useless and annoying and the're both wrong.
⚠️This source explains in details png's features! I'm gonna go over them briefly in this section!⚠️
The biggest issue I have with webp ain't webp itself, but the extreme cultists who want to increase adoption. They repeat adnauseam that webp is better compressed than png and lossless, and only one of those things is true, but not a good point. I learned recently that webp can be lossy to certain pngs because png has more features that webp doesn't have. For example png can have the higher color depth of 16 bits per channel versus webp and its 8 bits per channel. Png can have a gamma channel, webp cannot. Png has metadata to figure out the best way to display an image on monitors and print correctly so the colors stay the same on all of them, not a thing on webp. This wouldn't be really a 'visible' loss, but still a loss nonetheless.
I also hate how webp was explicitly designed to be either lossy or lossless. The normie won't know the difference and will make lossy webps by accident while trying to compress their image. On top of it, this filetype is limited to a whopping 16383 x 16383![1] Even jpeg has unlimited filesize!
Webp is at its best when it's used on clipart because there's little to no benefit for png on them, and it serves well enough its main purpose of improving load time on websites since cliparts are inherently meant to be used on websites in their biggest forms possible contrary to artwork which isn't really meant to be displayed in fullsize online and usually why deviantart and furaffinity resort to generate a lower quality thumbnail
Another file format folks dislike for its lack of support. I heard it was good for photos, being converted on the fly by most cameras, and particularly resilient agaisnt corruption, but I never used it and never seen anybody online use it, I'd have better chances if I tried flickr maybe.
A file format I really like (not to the point I'm gonna turn into a jehovah's witness for it) that is the successor to jpeg. It has better compression, more features and not as visible artifacts as jpeg on compressed images. Jpeg is simply too outdated to be usable in the modern day.
It suffers mostly from the same lack of support as webp and tiff which is sad to say it. https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/141819/what-is-avif-and-why-do-website-builders-automatically-convert-jpeg-images-to-i
The filetype when cameras don't support tiff or tiff's been disabled. I got no opinion on this one cause I have no idea how much it differs from other file formats.
The oldest file format ever, rarely used and I reckon webmasters never touch it because I haven't ever seen it on any site, support for it on art galleries and image hosts is rather bad.
The only time I had to deal with this file format, it was when I dragged an image from Firefox directly into an image editor. It opens the tmp directory and loads the image with a bmp file format, it will always lack transparency because it ain't supported.
Good for favicons, bad for everything else.
My favorite filetype on the list and the one that's most likely to outlive all the others. Hundreds of features not available on any other filetype, ample support from online websites. Excellent visual fidelity, even compressed, and universal in use. There are so few filetypes better than png that png is the standard for quality images. Support for it has only grown stronger with apng which is meant to replace gif.
The previously mentioned color depth, gamma channel and metadata which is great to store information if you wanna hide smaller, finer details in the image.
The biggest problem with png is its size on the drive which comes as a side-effect from having too much features and by overloading with information image viewers tend to not handle it well.
This filetype destroys artworks, don't use it. It is especially bad on pixel art and art featuring solid colors like cliparts, cartoon art and simple comics. Elaborate fine art is less likely to get hurt by jpeg.
The biggest problem with this one is that it only supports 256 colors and I don't mean each channel gets 256 shades like png or webp, no you can only use 256 colors period and transparency can only be on or off, it can't be semi-transparent.
Pixel art, animated or not, is the best for gif. Small pixely cliparts and forum emotes are perfectly suitable for gif too.
Heads up! I'm an artist, not a video editor, so my knowlefge on video extensions is limited. Compressing them or using ffmpeg is harder for me than compressing or converting images files. Don't take it too seriously if I got some misconceptions with some filetypes listed below.
It's sad whenever a perfectly fine gif gets converted into mp4 by sites like X and instagram.....
Far less destructive compression than mp4, very browser-friendly and just a well-rounded nice format all around. I heard you could change the size of the webm on the fly which isn't possible for most other file formats
Actually criminally heavy on the system. A 1GB webm is probably a 10GB avi. Avi is more oriented toward quality, but I can only excuse it when the file is under 10MB, but avis are way too heavy.
It's fine. I don't really hear any audio quality loss when a file goes from wav to mp3 unlike jpeg which has very visible artifacts.
There's probly some kind of lossy compression, but again if it ain't audible, then i don't care.
Though it should be noted web support for it sucks for the simple reason that a licensing fee is required to host mp3 files.
Wav is to audio what png is to images. Uncompressed, but unlike png it doesn't have anything else going for it, so it's barebones while still managing to be bigger on the drive.
Unless you realy care for audio quality, I reckon it's not worth using.
Combines mp3's compression (and I heard it had better compression even) with wav's accessibility.
Best of all, it's completely open source. Wav is still owned by microsoft even without the royalties.