My introduction to JPEG-XL was by 2kliksphillip on YouTube, he has a few really good analyses on this topic, including this video: https://youtu.be/FlWjf8asI4Y
I think the article is slightly misleading: it says "Google has resumed work on JPEG XL", but I don't think they have - their announcement only says they "would welcome contributions" to implement JPEG XL support. In other words, Google won't do it themselves, but their new position is they're now willing to allow someone else to do the work.
Describing it as 'Google' is misleading, because different arms of the company might as well be completely different companies. The Chrome org seems to have had the same stance as Firefox with regards to JPEG XL: "we don't want to add 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++ because it's a giant gaping security risk", and the JPEG XL team (in a completely separate org) is addressing those concerns by implementing a Rust version. I'd guess that needing the "commitment to long-term maintenance" is Chrome fighting with Google Research or whatever about long-term headcount allocation towards support: Chrome doesn't want the JPEG XL team to launch and abandon JPEG XL in chrome and leaving Chrome engineers to deal with the fallout.
It's technically correct. Googlers (at Google Research Zurich) have been working on jxl-rs, a Rust implementation of JPEG XL. Google Research has been involved in JPEG XL from the beginning, both in the design of the codec and in the implementation of libjxl and now jxl-rs.
But until now, the position of other Googlers (in the Chrome team) was that they didn't want to have JPEG XL support in Chrome. And that changed now. Which is a big deal.
It's a huge piece for sure, but not the only one. For example, Firefox and Windows both don't support it out of the box currently. Firefox requires nightly or an extension, and on Windows you need to download support from the Microsoft store.
> on Windows you need to download support from the Microsoft store.
To be really fair, on Windows:
- H.264 is the only guaranteed (modern-ish) video codec (HEVC, VP9, AV1 is not built-in unless the device manufacturer bothered to do it)
- JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the only guaranteed (widely-used) image codecs (HEIF, AVIF, and JXL is also not built-in)
- MP3 and AAC are the only guaranteed (modern-ish) audio codecs (Opus is another module)
... and all of them are widely used when Windows 7 was released (before the modern codecs) so probably modules are now the modern Windows Method™ for codecs.
Note on pre-8 HEVC support: the codec (when not on VLC or other software bundling their own codecs) is often on that CyberLink Bluray player, not a built-in one.
2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images.
Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube.
It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectively figured out how to stream a Hollywood movie to a pocket device over radio with a quality exceeding that of a typical cinema theatre, but these multi-trillion market cap corporations have all utterly failed to allow users to reliably send a still image with the same quality to each other!
Any year now, maybe in 2030s, someone will get around to a ticket that is currently at position 11,372 down the list below thousands of internal bullshit that nobody needed done, rearranging a dashboard nobody has ever opened, or whatever, and get around to letting computers be used for images. You know, utilising the screen, the only part billions of users ever look at, with their human eyes.
I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.
I’m wondering if HDR means something different to me, because I see HDR images all the time. I can share HDR images via phones (this seems to be the default behavior on iPhone/Mac messages), I can see HDR PNG stills on the web (https://github.com/swankjesse/hdr-emojis), I can see wide gamut P3 images on the web as well (https://webkit.org/blog-files/color-gamut/).
Sure, me too! I can take a HDR P3 gamut picture with my iPhone and share it with all my friends and relatives... that have iPhones.
What I cannot do is take a picture with a $4000 Nikon DSLR and share it in the same way... unless I also buy a Mac so I can encode it in the magic Apple-only format[1] that works... for Mac and IOS users. I have a Windows PC. Linux users are similarly out in the cold.
This situation so incredibly bad that I can pop the SD card of my camera into an reader plugged into my iPhone, process the RAW image on the iPhone with the Lightroom iPhone app in full, glorious HDR... and then be unable to export the HDR image onto the same device for viewing because oh-my-fucking-god-why!?
[1] They claim it is a standards-compliant HEIF file. No, it isn't. That's a filthy lie. My camera produces a HDR HEIF file natively, in-body. Everything opens it just fine, except all Apple ecosystem devices. I suspect the only way to get Apple to budge is to sue them for false advertising. But... sigh... they'll just change their marketing to remove "HEIF" and move on.
Indeed. I tried every possible export format from Adobe Lightroom including JPG + HDR gainmaps, and it looks... potato.
With a narrow gamut like sRGB it looks only slightly better than JPG, but with a wider gamut you get terrible posterization. People's faces turn grey and green and blue skies get bands across them.
Meanwhile my iPhone creates flawless 10-bit Dolby Vision video with the press of a button that I can share with anyone without it turning into a garbled mess.
Just last week I checked up on the "state of the art" for HDR still image sharing with Gemini Deep Research and after ten minutes of trawling through obscure forum posts it came back with a blunt "No".
We've figured out how to make machines think, but not how to exchange pictures in the quality that my 12-year-old DSLR is capable of capturing!
... unless I make a YouTube video with the images. That -- and only that -- works!
What are you talking about? You extract 3 exposure values from the raw camera buffer and merge and tone map them manually into a single HDR image. The final exported image format may not have the full supported color space, but that’s on you. Apple uses the P3 space by default.
This has been supported by both Apple and third party apps for over a decade. I’ve implemented it myself.
That's not HDR. That's pretend HDR in an SDR file, an artistic effect, nothing more.
Actual HDR needs at least 10 bits per channel and a modern display with peak brightness far in excess of traditional monitors. Ideally over 1,000 nits compared to typical LCD brightness of about 200.
You also don't need "three pictures". That was a hack used for the oldest digital cameras that had about 8 bits of precision in their analog to digital converters (ADC). Even my previous camera had a 14-bit ADC and in practice could capture about 12.5 bits of dynamic range, which is plenty for HDR imaging.
Lightroom can now edit and export images in "true" HDR, basically the same as a modern HDR10 or Dolby Vision movie.
The problem is that the only way to share the exported HDR images is to convert them to a movie file format, and share them as a slide show.
There is no widely compatible still image format that can preserve 10-bit-per-channel colours, wide-gamut, and HDR metadata.
> the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube
i understand some of this frustration, but really you just have to use ffmpeg to convert it to a web format (which can be done by ffmpeg.js running in a service worker if your cpu is expensive) and spell <img as <video muted autoplay playsinline which is only a little annoying
> I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.
hear hear
> If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.
i can think of a few better uses for such a wand...
Here are the direct links:
blink-dev mailing list
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKc...
Tracking Bug (reopened)
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40168998
My introduction to JPEG-XL was by 2kliksphillip on YouTube, he has a few really good analyses on this topic, including this video: https://youtu.be/FlWjf8asI4Y
I think the article is slightly misleading: it says "Google has resumed work on JPEG XL", but I don't think they have - their announcement only says they "would welcome contributions" to implement JPEG XL support. In other words, Google won't do it themselves, but their new position is they're now willing to allow someone else to do the work.
Describing it as 'Google' is misleading, because different arms of the company might as well be completely different companies. The Chrome org seems to have had the same stance as Firefox with regards to JPEG XL: "we don't want to add 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++ because it's a giant gaping security risk", and the JPEG XL team (in a completely separate org) is addressing those concerns by implementing a Rust version. I'd guess that needing the "commitment to long-term maintenance" is Chrome fighting with Google Research or whatever about long-term headcount allocation towards support: Chrome doesn't want the JPEG XL team to launch and abandon JPEG XL in chrome and leaving Chrome engineers to deal with the fallout.
It's technically correct. Googlers (at Google Research Zurich) have been working on jxl-rs, a Rust implementation of JPEG XL. Google Research has been involved in JPEG XL from the beginning, both in the design of the codec and in the implementation of libjxl and now jxl-rs.
But until now, the position of other Googlers (in the Chrome team) was that they didn't want to have JPEG XL support in Chrome. And that changed now. Which is a big deal.
jxl-rs https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs was referenced as a possibility; what library is Safari using for jpegxl?
libjxl:
https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/7879cb55638ec765dc033d...
The final piece of the JPEG XL puzzle!
It's a huge piece for sure, but not the only one. For example, Firefox and Windows both don't support it out of the box currently. Firefox requires nightly or an extension, and on Windows you need to download support from the Microsoft store.
Would PDF 2.0 (which also depends JPEG XL and Brotli) put pressure on Firefox and Windows to add more easy to use support?
I don't think so: JPEG 2000, as far as I know, isn't generally supported for web use in web browsers, but it is supported in PDF.
JPEG-XL is recommended as the preferred format for HDR content for PDFs, so it’s more likely to be encountered:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/10/another_chance_for_jp...
What I mean to say is, I believe browsers do support JPEG 2000 in PDF, just not on the web.
the last time that I check it, I find that I need to convert to Jpeg to show the image in browsers.
> on Windows you need to download support from the Microsoft store.
To be really fair, on Windows:
- H.264 is the only guaranteed (modern-ish) video codec (HEVC, VP9, AV1 is not built-in unless the device manufacturer bothered to do it)
- JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the only guaranteed (widely-used) image codecs (HEIF, AVIF, and JXL is also not built-in)
- MP3 and AAC are the only guaranteed (modern-ish) audio codecs (Opus is another module)
... and all of them are widely used when Windows 7 was released (before the modern codecs) so probably modules are now the modern Windows Method™ for codecs.
Note on pre-8 HEVC support: the codec (when not on VLC or other software bundling their own codecs) is often on that CyberLink Bluray player, not a built-in one.
2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images.
Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube.
It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectively figured out how to stream a Hollywood movie to a pocket device over radio with a quality exceeding that of a typical cinema theatre, but these multi-trillion market cap corporations have all utterly failed to allow users to reliably send a still image with the same quality to each other!
Any year now, maybe in 2030s, someone will get around to a ticket that is currently at position 11,372 down the list below thousands of internal bullshit that nobody needed done, rearranging a dashboard nobody has ever opened, or whatever, and get around to letting computers be used for images. You know, utilising the screen, the only part billions of users ever look at, with their human eyes.
I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.
I wish I could upvote this multiple times. Spot on, the situation is completely batshit bonkers insane.
I’m wondering if HDR means something different to me, because I see HDR images all the time. I can share HDR images via phones (this seems to be the default behavior on iPhone/Mac messages), I can see HDR PNG stills on the web (https://github.com/swankjesse/hdr-emojis), I can see wide gamut P3 images on the web as well (https://webkit.org/blog-files/color-gamut/).
What am I missing?
> I can share HDR images via phones
Sure, me too! I can take a HDR P3 gamut picture with my iPhone and share it with all my friends and relatives... that have iPhones.
What I cannot do is take a picture with a $4000 Nikon DSLR and share it in the same way... unless I also buy a Mac so I can encode it in the magic Apple-only format[1] that works... for Mac and IOS users. I have a Windows PC. Linux users are similarly out in the cold.
This situation so incredibly bad that I can pop the SD card of my camera into an reader plugged into my iPhone, process the RAW image on the iPhone with the Lightroom iPhone app in full, glorious HDR... and then be unable to export the HDR image onto the same device for viewing because oh-my-fucking-god-why!?
[1] They claim it is a standards-compliant HEIF file. No, it isn't. That's a filthy lie. My camera produces a HDR HEIF file natively, in-body. Everything opens it just fine, except all Apple ecosystem devices. I suspect the only way to get Apple to budge is to sue them for false advertising. But... sigh... they'll just change their marketing to remove "HEIF" and move on.
Not that I disagree, but HEIF is a container format. What is inside that container is essential. HEIC in HEIF, AVIF in HEIF, etc.
It is incredibly annoying that instead of adopting JpegXL they decided to use UltraHDR. A giant hack which works very poorly.
> A giant hack which works very poorly.
Indeed. I tried every possible export format from Adobe Lightroom including JPG + HDR gainmaps, and it looks... potato.
With a narrow gamut like sRGB it looks only slightly better than JPG, but with a wider gamut you get terrible posterization. People's faces turn grey and green and blue skies get bands across them.
Meanwhile my iPhone creates flawless 10-bit Dolby Vision video with the press of a button that I can share with anyone without it turning into a garbled mess.
Just last week I checked up on the "state of the art" for HDR still image sharing with Gemini Deep Research and after ten minutes of trawling through obscure forum posts it came back with a blunt "No".
We've figured out how to make machines think, but not how to exchange pictures in the quality that my 12-year-old DSLR is capable of capturing!
... unless I make a YouTube video with the images. That -- and only that -- works!
What are you talking about? You extract 3 exposure values from the raw camera buffer and merge and tone map them manually into a single HDR image. The final exported image format may not have the full supported color space, but that’s on you. Apple uses the P3 space by default.
This has been supported by both Apple and third party apps for over a decade. I’ve implemented it myself.
That's not HDR. That's pretend HDR in an SDR file, an artistic effect, nothing more.
Actual HDR needs at least 10 bits per channel and a modern display with peak brightness far in excess of traditional monitors. Ideally over 1,000 nits compared to typical LCD brightness of about 200.
You also don't need "three pictures". That was a hack used for the oldest digital cameras that had about 8 bits of precision in their analog to digital converters (ADC). Even my previous camera had a 14-bit ADC and in practice could capture about 12.5 bits of dynamic range, which is plenty for HDR imaging.
Lightroom can now edit and export images in "true" HDR, basically the same as a modern HDR10 or Dolby Vision movie.
The problem is that the only way to share the exported HDR images is to convert them to a movie file format, and share them as a slide show.
There is no widely compatible still image format that can preserve 10-bit-per-channel colours, wide-gamut, and HDR metadata.
> the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube
i understand some of this frustration, but really you just have to use ffmpeg to convert it to a web format (which can be done by ffmpeg.js running in a service worker if your cpu is expensive) and spell <img as <video muted autoplay playsinline which is only a little annoying
> I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.
hear hear
> If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.
i can think of a few better uses for such a wand...
> <img as <video muted autoplay playsinline which is only a little annoying
Doesn't work for sharing images in text messages, social media posts, email, Teams, Wikipedia, etc...
> i can think of a few better uses for such a wand...
We all have our priorities.