Google today announced Guetzli, a new open source algorithm that will reduce the JPEG image by 35%, compared to currently available methods while maintaining the same quality.
“Guetzli [guɛtsli] — cookie in Swiss German — is a JPEG encoder for digital images and web graphics that can enable faster online experiences by producing smaller JPEG files while still maintaining compatibility with existing browsers, image processing applications and the JPEG standard, said Google.
The visual quality of JPEG images is directly correlated to its multi-stage compression process: color space transform, discrete cosine transform, and quantization. Guetzli specifically targets the quantization stage in which the more visual quality loss is introduced, the smaller the resulting file.
While Guetzli creates smaller image file sizes, the tradeoff is that these search algorithms take significantly longer to create compressed images than currently available methods.
This is aimed at webmasters and graphic designers so that they can use it in their photographic content, making users’ experience smoother on image-heavy websites in addition to reducing load times and bandwidth costs for mobile users.