When working with images that need to be integrated into web pages, their characteristics must be taken into account in order to obtain maximum performance and achieve the objectives pursued with them.
Optimizing your photos and, above all, choosing the format that best suits your needs are essential when working with images on a website.
What are the most commonly used formats?
There are several image formats that are commonly used when working with photographs, depending on the needs and the intended use of these files:
JPG . This is the most widely used and well-known bulk sms poland format, as it is the one used for digital photographs. Therefore, it is the one most used on web pages, applications and social networks, and the one that browsers best recognise. It can be edited well and saves CMYK or RGB colour information as well as the greyscale, but its main disadvantage is that it loses quality when compressed.
PNG . Its main advantage is that it allows compression without losing much quality, and it also gives the possibility of creating transparencies, something that is not possible with JPG. Its size is considerable and the photographs tend to weigh a lot, so it is used on web pages or applications where there is a special interest in maintaining the highest possible quality, but above all to create logos and vector drawings, which can be adapted while maintaining all the information.
GIF . This is the format used to create moving images without the need for specific systems and programs for their design. It is therefore highly recommended for creating animations and transparencies, although with limited colors, since it barely supports 256. It is also used to create simple logos and illustrations without much quality with flat colors and that weigh little. Photographic images lose a lot of quality with this format, so this type of file is not usually used for them.
TIFF . This is the format chosen for professional image processing, as it maintains high resolution and quality. This type of file maintains all the image information, which is why it is very heavy.
Choosing the best image format for the web, which one should I choose?
The possibilities of the most commonly used image formats allow them to be used for different purposes, but it is clear that some are more efficient than others.
The characteristics of JPG allow this format to be one of the most recommended for web pages, since both portals and search engines allow its adaptation with greater guarantees. In addition, its editing is simple and it can be adapted to the needs of each page, which is why it is the most used format. But in terms of web optimization, this and other formats may be replaced by new generation image formats. As we can see in the image, Google itself, through its tools to improve the online performance of pages, indicates the use of this type of image formats as a good practice to improve the user experience.