Anyone of you guys switched for jxl for their personal archive yet? If so: What settings are you using?
For what reason? My HDD space is mainly eaten by RAWs, not by JPGs. As long as I donāt know if JPEG XL is really becomming a standard format I stay on the good ald JPG.
JPEG XL is not only for lossy compressed files. Many folks (including me) use TIFF for derivative master files (the finished product from darktable). I recently converted a whole bunch of TIFFs to lossless JPEG XL and saved a lot of space.
Lossy JPEG XL is mainly interesting for web use, but weāre not there yet.
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Yes, I have.
I am not a professional photographer so I have no intention of preserving hundreds of thousands of RAWs forever. What for? So that an archivist or curator might one day discover my gems and set up a posthumous exhibition? Or do I really think that some time in the future I am going to be willing to spend hours skimming through tons of pictures, of which 90% are rubbish anyway, and finding some potential masterpieces to be reedit?
Thatās delusional.
Storage is not cheap, backup is not cheap, keeping an organised archive of photos is not cheap (in terms of time) and life is too short.
Iām exporting the photos that I am happy with in 95% quality (as per darktable settings). The Web is not ready? Iām not publishing my photos on the web and Apple is ready anyway.
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I switched to jxl as export format for my personal archive. Iām not at my PC right now, so canāt double-check but I think I have quality set to 95% and effort to something like 6 or so.
Something I learned: Do not use too high effort, as it significantly increases compression time and the gain in file size is negligible.
For printing, I typically re-export as tiff and for sharing, I most often simply convert (and scale down) the jxl (assuming that the detail loss by re-compressing is small enough that no one will notice).
At some point I even converted lots of existing jpgs to jxl (this can be done without dataloss) to save some storage.
Sure, local storage is cheap but for my remote backup storage I pay a monthly fee, so better keep the amount needed there as low as possible.
So lossless jxl is smaller than typical tiff compression? Good to know.
Edit: Indeed, I just tested with some random photo:
- tiff (compression deflate): 36 MB
- jxl (quality 100, I guess that means lossless?): 16 MB
Thatās quite a significant difference.
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I hardly use Tiffs and if one doesnāt keep itās RAWs, it makes sense. Anyway. Iām not interested in converting files every now and then. If it is not clear, that a format is getting a long standing standard I stay where I am.
I am on the fence, both for archival purpose and sharing on the web, because I donāt really know how well the format is recognized at the present time. For my website and sharing via google photos I use webp because itās really lighter than traditionnal jpg.
For the web, I donāt know yet when to switch to jxl. ĀÆ\(ć)/ĀÆ
Thanks for giving me motivation to just get rid of photos in bulk
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I am on the fence. My image viewer supports them and I have done some tests:
- They occupy less space, so reading them in bulk (for culling) is easier. My photos are on my BTRFS array, running on HDDs, so read speeds are just okay(200MB/s, slower when also reading metadata, etc).
- They are more expensive to decode, so even with a smaller file, they can sometimes take longer to load completely.
Arguing about support is imo a weak point. The code exists, they are able to be decoded, so as long as GCC is around, they will be able to be decoded, this is not a problem at all.
AV2 is coming around, maybe weāll get a new image format too? For now I am converting all my incoming JPEGs to jxl, itās just logical, same image quality for 1/5th of the size.
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I think that my pics might actually be of use to local music historians of the future. The photos may even be of more use to them than they are to me! True, they wonāt need 50-100 pics of each concert, but hey, Iām not doing that culling for them.
What I am doing now, though, is removing full-size jpegs and keeping 1920*1280-and-raw. Even for stuff that I did not take RAW, I may keep just 1920*1280. Frankly, thatās the resolution of my monitor anyway: historians should be happy with it!
I donāt think that jpeg xl is going to be a thing for me.
(as to how history gets my pics, havenāt solved this one yet. Probably via a friend in the same field/community who is 20 years younger than me.)
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I keep my raw files as I will improve in editing skills with time and editing programs will improve. However, currently I archive my edits as Tiff and sometimes PNG. The idea of lossless JXL as a smaller file size sounds interesting and worth investigating especially for some of the panorama stitching I do.
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So far I have almost 300GB of mostly RAW photos from the past (almost exactly) 5 years. Thatās absolutely crazy and I need pick a few that I like in each month and delete the restā¦
I was considering a new external HDD, but when I delete most photos that I donāt need, I think Iām good for another 8-10 years 
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Is the improvement really that big for you? Itās been a while, so Iām not sure but if I remember correctly, transcoding my jpgs to jxl reduced average file size by something around 10-20%.
Compared to Fuji jpgs from camera, yeah(15MB to 3.5MB). Of course I could also run the regular jpeg encoder on top of those as well, and probably yield good savings for near lossless, but jxl is designed to re-encode jpegs while avoiding artifacts from multiple re-encodings. I shouldāve explained the use case better 
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I have been experimenting with them, but my cloud storage solution was not yet displaying previews of the images, so I hold off for now
I became interested in the format after learning that jxl is a format Apple makes available for ProRaw images. Compression becomes valuable for wide gamut and HDR images at high resolution, especially with limited phone storage (and all that cloud subscription stuff).
But I hardly bother with HDR lately, and my monitor only supports up to Adobe rgb. Jxl format isnāt universally supported yet, so I continue to use jpeg for dt exports. Even for posting images on this forum.
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I normally save my edits as PNG.
Just checked with a typical image:
jxl (lossless): 12.2 MB
webp (lossless): 12.8 MB
PNG: 17.3 MB
I try to cull most of my shots and only keep the āinterestingā ones. Then I archive the (uncompressed) raw file with BZip3. The very few good images I also keep as developed PNG files. Jxl would save my ~30% but I have so few of those that I do not care about 10 GB disk space.
Depends on. I have no fear of loosing data, but compatibility. I donāt want to think about in what format I need the picture to be able to display it. No matter what platform I use. JPG is at the moment the standard and at the moment good enough for me regarding compression and quality. But of course every person has different needs.
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Well since there are open source encoders/decoders are available I am not fearing that if I archive in JXL I will not be able to read it a some point in time.
But currently I is not yet so standard in all kinds of viewers etc. Even in Google Chrome is still behind a feature flag.
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