- AVIF (AV1 Image File Format)
- An image format based on keyframes from the AV1 video codec. It achieves significantly better compression than JPEG and WebP at equivalent visual quality, with support in all major browsers since 2022.
- Alpha channel
- A per-pixel transparency value stored alongside the colour channels in a PNG or WebP file. JPEG does not support an alpha channel, so transparent areas must be filled with a solid background colour when converting to JPEG.
- Lossy vs lossless
- Lossy compression permanently discards imperceptible colour information to reduce file size — decoded pixels differ subtly from the source. Lossless compression reorganises data without any information loss, producing bit-identical decoded pixels.
- Browser support
- The set of browsers that can decode and render a particular image format. WebP has broad support since 2020. AVIF support arrived in 2021–2022. JPEG and PNG have universal support dating back decades.
- Chroma subsampling
- An encoding optimisation used by JPEG, WebP, and AVIF that stores colour (chroma) at lower resolution than brightness (luma). At 4:2:0 subsampling, colour is stored at one quarter the spatial resolution, which saves bytes but smudges sharp colour boundaries.
- Encoder profile
- A set of encoding parameters — such as compression level, entropy coding mode, and colour precision — that determine the trade-off between file size, quality, and encoding speed for a given format.