Spoken like someone who doesn't do any skin development.

I stopped including IE hacks in my CSS many years ago, and I suspect Laza has done the same. AVIF support in the browser or not, there are a bunch of other "layout" things that won't work in IE anyway.

I think JPEG XL is probably a non-starter. It's been around since 2018-2020, but is still not supported anywhere. Almost no browser support, no support in Windows, and support only in a few image editing apps. The people behind JPEG XL bravely tell us that it's gaining momentum. They've been saying that at least since 2022. Reminds me of: "This will be The Year of Desktop Linux, when it crashes through that 3% barrier!!!"

When it comes to what cameras will support, the Apple HEIC experience is a cautionary tale. "HEIC is better, so we're going to default to it. Sure, you can't use it anywhere other than your phone, but damn it, we're Apple, so if we standardize on it, the rest of the world will have to follow!" Hasn't happened. My advice to any owner of a new iPhone is to turn off HEIC as quickly as possible. It's just trouble. Native AVIF support would be much smarter.


I'll bet you wouldn't be able to measure the difference. I'm on an aging desktop from 2019, and when I view an AVIF in the browser, it pops up instantly. I'm not sitting there waiting for it to "paint" the image. And since the AVIF file is going to be less than half the size, page loading should be faster. So, AVIF for "fast browing," and AVIF for "detail."

Added b2 to the beta core location now.

Changes:

• Now keeps track of AVIF related image settings changes so you can just hit "Make album"
• When previewing and selecting "Open image in new tab", the browser will indeed do so (Added the correct MIME type for AVIF to the web server)
• The "Variants" tab will now turn green if you have any Variants added.

Works good.


Also works good.


Also works good. The variant preset formats are still using WebP, but since none of my skins supports variants, this is not exactly on my radar.

Take the rest of the weekend off.

What's the complex thing of supporting Variants today? We have an API that generates the proper picture tag with nested img tag. Try this:
1) Select an image
2) Open system console and issue:

selected.elements().thumbnails().picture()

3) Watch the output:

<picture>
 <source type="image/avif" srcset="thumbs/victor-garcia.avif 99w">
 <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="thumbs/victor-garcia-198w.jpg 198w">
 <img src="thumbs/victor-garcia.avif" width="99" height="124" alt="victor-garcia">
</picture>

(Since v38). This API doesn't return a String. It returns a jsoup Element, so you can easily manipulate it. Here's how to strip the embedded img element for instance:

selected.elements().thumbnails().picture().select("img").remove()

We've had this conversation before, but I'll give it one more shot.

1. The lightbox script I use doesn't know what to do with a <picture> element with multiple sources. It simply fails to detect that there's any href to an image there. The Floatbox developer is my age, and has well and truly retired, not wishing to spend his final decade on this nonsense, unlike me.

But I had this conversation with him, and his reaction was exactly the same as mine, to wit....

2. Using variants doubles, triples, or quadruples the processing time, doubles, triples, or quadruples the storage needed, and finally, the real killer, it doubles, triples, or quadruples the uploading time. Like millions of others, I have an asymmetrical connection, with uploading speed that's only one-tenth of the download speed. And using FTP, which has to make a new connection for every file, variants slow things even more. And....

3. There's just no need for them. Variants are useful for providing a different image to visitors on different devices. For example, the wide shot for a big monitor, but a more closely-cropped version of the image on a phone. But jAlbum variants can't do that.

But there's no reason to provide different sizes of the same image to different visitors. If bandwidth were limited or expensive, it would make sense. But that's not true for the vast majority of visitors. Someone visiting on a tablet or phone has virtually the same available bandwidth as someone visiting on a mammoth desktop.

"Oh, but all those extra pixels are just wasted on the mobile visitor!" Who cares?

Provide the visitor with images that are large enough for the currently common 1920x1080 monitor. Heck, with AVIF, you can afford to go HiDPI without any speed penalty, and take care of the double-density monitors out there (though I strongly suspect the difference isn't detectable - Apple went to double density to improve the appearance of small images, not of large ones).

Size variants are a ten-year-old "solution" to a ten-year-old problem. Read about the history of srcset - it was invented to deal with limited, expensive bandwidth on phones. Guess what's not true any longer.

(And don't get me started on lazy loading, which is intended to save bandwidth by not downloading images that might not be needed, but at the cost of page loading that feels like molasses to visitors with both fast and slow connections. Terrible idea.)

No, but since my skins don't support them, it was never more than a one-liner, no matter where it is.

But I think I'd move the AVIF Quality and Speed to the General tab, with an eye to eliminating the WebP Quality eventually.

And geez, while you're at it, can you please make the boxes orthogonal? Attached, my proposal from a previous jAlbum version (edit: removed - see updated version, a couple of posts below this one). A hint: "hfill."

The sharpening and quality options should be in the Scaling box, too - they don't apply to original, untouched images

The current layout is an offense against dog and man, with layout elements misaligned and floating around on the loose.

(My rule about settings panels, BTW, is to keep them under 1250x670 pixels. With the default font size in the app, that keeps them fully accessible on a typical 1366x768 laptop, or on a 1920x1080 monitor set at 150% in Windows.)

Until I read your post I wasn't really aware of AVIF. Sounds very exciting & promising. Smaller file size, faster, better image quality - what's not to like? But I have a couple of questions. In most albums of my three websites I provide the ability of visitors to download images. I'm assuming that changing from jpeg to AVIF will result in downloaded images also being AVIF and, if that's the case, what's the effect on end users, especially if they wish add it to their phone or take it to Walmart for a print? A number of my visitors are older relatives who are quite challenged when dealing with changes & technology.

I shoot RAW with Canon and ProRAW (JPEG Lossless) with my iPhone 16 Pro. I've been converting these to JPEG prior to importing into my jAlbum project folder. Will I need to convert to AVIF or will jAlbum have that ability? Would be nice to save a step.

And a really good thing happened a few days ago ... a few updates back the ability to upload from jAlbum to my web host ceased to function properly so I've been using FileZilla. Well, FZ started acting up so I returned to jAlbum for uploads and they now work better than ever. Not sure what happened - user error on my part or cyber gremlins in the Mac but the built in loader is very nice. Thanks.

Merry Christmas to all ... and a special shout out to Jeff for developing Neptune and providing umpteen different ways for users to further customize & mod the skin. Jeff's one on one support and his ability to solve crazy problems is really special. I know he's semi-retired but I hope he doesn't retire from jAlbum/Neptune for a long time.

Take a moment to visit my primary site at this LINK. I've tried to make it user friendly for my friends/relatives who always seem to need spoon feeding. Even so, I've provided extra "features" for those interested. In the INFO section there's a link to my photo gear with samples (still a work in progress). I change the main page theme every couple of weeks or so. The first thumbnails are the most current photos and eventually are moved into the yearly highlights folders. The last two folders are direct links to my other websites. So, lots to see. Jeff - there's even an easter egg on the main page that you might enjoy - or not. It's not too hard to find.