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JPEG, GIF, PNG OR SVG - Which should You use?

Sarah Chima on January 07, 2018

There are a lot of things frontend developers are concerned about. Image management and optimization are part of them. Why is that so? Images are s...

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Ben Halpern • Jan 7 '18

Great overview. On dev.to we load different formats based on the situation and browser. Cloudinary handles a lot of the heavy lifting if our code is correct, which is really nice.

Because Chrome supports WebP and it's also our most popular browser in terms of traffic, most of our image traffic is served as WebP.

The subject is pretty poorly understood so this article goes a long long way.

Sarah Chima • Jan 7 '18

Thanks Ben for sharing this. Cloudinary is great for image management. I'm amazed at what can be done with it. Thank you for reading. :)

arj • Mar 8 '18

Do you still use gif?

Belhassen Chelbi • Jan 7 '18

I really like SVG , they can be easily responsive, not just because "scalable" is in the name, they're good for performance and accessibility and when mixing it with JavaScript , we can do a lot of amazing things, I mean look at the projects with d3.js. I like PNG for the transparency wen I need it, and jpeg when I need to make the website faster , of course without loosing a remarkable losss of quality.
This is a cool article Sarah ,as always ♥

Sarah Chima • Jan 7 '18

Thanks for sharing this. Others can learn from the way you use it. Thank you. :)

Jingyi Zeng • Jan 8 '19

You can use archer-svgs to load svg async and cache it in localStorage, when you reuse svg without http request!Remove svgs from your js-bunilde and Thin your js-bundle forever!(eg: Dont reload 100kb svg bundle only for 1kb svg update!)

Jingyi Zeng • Jan 8 '19

Dušan • Mar 8 '18

Thank you for the great post. I've never thought about it before, but after your post I am convinced that I will in the future. It was always like this for me: "Hmmmm.... What should I choose?... PNG or JPEG... Let it be PNG, WHO CARES!" :) Thanks.