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Improving the Images on My Site Will Be Harder Than I Thought

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So, I’ve wanted to improve how my site images were handled for a while now and I decided to get to it by attempting to implement the free fixes of transcoding photographic JPEG images to JXL (which it compresses losslessly) and . Turns out it’s a lot more work than I expected it to be.

I thought I’d be able to get away with a few command line scripts but I ended up with a lot of scripting node and I even begrugingly learned Power Query which I heard about from a YouTube video for data analysts. It’s very powerful but also frustrating.

Anyways, JXL reduced photographic and non-photographic images by about 20% and WebP reduced non photographic images by 13%. Not bad for a “quick fix”. I tried JPEG 2000 which has a lossless mode and it made non-photographic images 6× bigger than the source. I would do AVIF but the lossless mode is useless and I’m still figuring out HEVC (which along with technical issues has licensing issues).

Check the repo to follow my progress but be warned that the code is totally trash.