Guetzli: Google Rolls Out A New JPEG Encoder

Google has announced Guetzli, not a German cookie, but rather a new open-source algorithm for creating high-quality JPEGs that are 35% smaller than currently available methods.

Guetzli is a JPEG encoder for digital images and web graphics that can yield much smaller JPEG files while maintaining compatibility with existing browsers and other JPEG-using software.

Google announced, "And while Guetzli produces smaller image file sizes without sacrificing quality, we additionally found that in experiments where compressed image file sizes are kept constant that human raters consistently preferred the images Guetzli produced over libjpeg images, even when the libjpeg files were the same size or even slightly larger. We think this makes the slower compression a worthy tradeoff."

Learn more about this new Google JPEG image encoder via the Google Open-Source Blog while the code can be found on GitHub.