Disclosure: This article includes an affiliate link to Canva Pro. If you sign up through it, AllMediaTools may earn a one-time commission on your first payment at no extra cost to you — worth mentioning since it’s a flat fee rather than a cut of your ongoing subscription, so we have no incentive to push … Read more
Disclosure: This article includes an affiliate link to Adobe Creative Cloud. If you sign up through it, AllMediaTools may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We’re including Adobe itself as one of the options discussed below, not just the alternatives — the point of this article is to help you decide honestly … Read more
Open a professional editing timeline and you’ll often find footage in a format called ProRes, with files that are five, ten, sometimes twenty times larger than the final H.264 video that eventually gets uploaded. That looks backwards at first — why would anyone deliberately work with bigger files? The answer is that ProRes and H.264 … Read more
Someone sends you a company logo, you double-click it, and instead of opening as an image, your computer either shows nothing, opens a wall of code in a text editor, or asks what program should handle it. The file extension is .eps, and unlike a JPEG or PNG, it’s not something most everyday software knows … Read more
That tiny icon sitting next to a page title in a browser tab is called a favicon, and if you’ve ever gone looking for one on your own site or someone else’s, you’ve probably run into a file ending in .ico — a format that looks strangely old-fashioned compared to everything else on the modern … Read more
Every time you save a JPEG, rip an MP3, or zip a folder, you’re making a decision — often without realizing it — about whether it’s okay to permanently throw away some of your data to save space. That decision has a name: lossy vs lossless compression. Nearly every format comparison you’ll read (WebP vs … Read more
Of the “next-generation” image formats that have shown up over the past several years — WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL — JPEG XL is the one you’ve probably heard the least about, despite arguably having the most technically ambitious goals. There’s a specific, well-documented reason for that: its biggest browser dropped support right as it … Read more
If you’ve optimized images for the web anytime in the past few years, you’ve probably seen “AVIF” mentioned as the format that’s supposedly even better than WebP. It is, in a lot of ways — but “better on paper” and “ready to actually use as your default” are different questions, and the honest answer to … Read more
If you’ve read a general format comparison, you already know the broad strokes: WebP is smaller than PNG, JPEG doesn’t do transparency at all, and WebP is the modern default for the web. That’s the general answer — but “smaller is better” gets more complicated once transparency specifically is the thing you actually need. Logos, … Read more
You’re ripping a CD, exporting a podcast, or just trying to figure out why your iPhone keeps saving voice memos and downloaded music as files that aren’t MP3. AAC and MP3 are both lossy audio formats — both throw away some of the original sound data to shrink file size — but they were built … Read more