Digital media compression is much more complicated than the lossless file compression that we talked about previously even if we just stick to images. We briefly mentioned when to use PNG and when to use JPEG in the previous chapter. Here, we'll go into much more detail and explore some other exotic options.
We covered the rule of thumb, which says that PNG is the best image format for icons and JPEG is better for photos. These two formats are the most common for lossless and lossy image compression, respectively.
We will talk more about other image formats later, but you are usually constrained to the popular formats by what browsers support. So, how can you get more out of the common choices?
