Google reveals new image format

Google has introduced a new image format, which it claims delivers files 39 percent smaller than equivalent quality JPEGs, 3news.co.nz.

"Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time," Google product manager Richard Rabbat wrote on the company's blog.

"Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution."

The result is WebP, which the company claims delivers equivalent image quality to JPEG but uses 39 percent less space.

"In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size," wrote Mr Rabbat.