JPEG XL saves bytes but little software opens it

JPEG XL and AVIF both do more with fewer bytes. Neither has the thirty years of everything-opens-it that JPEG has.

A file browser of image thumbnails on a large screen — A wall of thumbnails, and one format that everything opens.

The weight of ubiquity

JPEG is over thirty years old: the Joint Photographic Experts Group published the standard in 1992, and it has been opened by everything from browsers to photolab kiosks ever since. That legacy is not a technical virtue — it is infrastructure, and infrastructure is almost impossible to dislodge.

Two formats have real claims to replace it. AVIF ↗ derives from the AV1 video codec, developed by the Alliance for Open Media; it compresses aggressively and handles wide colour gamut natively, which matters now that phones shoot Display P3 by default. At equivalent visual quality, AVIF regularly delivers files half the size of a JPEG. Chrome and Firefox have supported it since 2020 and 2021 respectively; Safari joined in version 16.

JPEG XL ↗ is the more ambitious of the two. It handles lossless compression, very high bit depths and a wide colour gamut; it can also re-encode an existing JPEG with zero data loss, which would make migration from old archives practical rather than destructive. The standard was published in 2022. Browser support has been uneven — Chrome experimented, dropped it in 2022, and a community argument about that decision ran long enough to become a minor story in itself.

A hand holding a printed proof up beside the monitor it came from, the same frame on screen. Cropped to the two edges meeting — Proof against display, same file, same profile: the only test that settles an argument.

For photographers specifically, JPEG XL is the more interesting format: it was designed with photographic content in mind rather than as a side-effect of video compression. The lossless JPEG re-encoding alone is worth attention if you have decades of JPEG archives you would rather not recompress.

Two X-Rite ColorChecker Passport panels open side by side showing grayscale and color swatches — The chart does not drift. The monitor does.Photo: X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Photo 2, Wikimedia Commons

What neither format can do is open in the software already installed on most machines. A JPEG moves from camera to edit to client without a conversation about whether the recipient can read the file. AVIF and JPEG XL still require that conversation in many workflows.

The practical answer for most photographers, for now, is to keep exporting JPEG for anything that must travel, watch what the major raw converters — Adobe, Phase One's Capture One, and the darktable team — add to their export panels, and revisit the question when the browser share of JPEG XL support stops being a footnote.