The story 11 October 2026
Chrome Brings Back the Photographer’s Image Format
Chrome 155, released on 6 October, can now show pictures saved as JPEG XL, a format built for high-quality photographs. Safari has shown them since 2023, so a site built around its pictures can now send them in this format to visitors on both.
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JPEG XL is a picture format made for photographs. Chrome’s engineers say it makes files 30 to 50 percent smaller than an ordinary JPEG, can save a picture with no loss of quality at all, and can carry HDR images: photographs with brighter highlights and deeper shadows than an ordinary picture, shown at full strength on screens built to display them.
Google tried the format in Chrome once before, hidden behind a setting most people never saw, and removed it at the end of 2022. Apple added it to Safari the following year. Chrome’s team now says it has brought the format back because web developers kept asking for it, year after year.
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The change a visitor will notice is how a large photograph arrives. A JPEG XL picture can appear whole almost at once, soft at first, and then sharpen as the rest of the file comes in, instead of leaving an empty frame or filling in from the top down. For a full-screen photograph at the top of a page, the first impression is the picture itself, not a gap waiting for it.
Photographs already saved as JPEGs can be repacked as JPEG XL with nothing lost. Apple’s WebKit team, which builds Safari, puts the saving at about a fifth of the file size on average. An archive of images gets lighter without a single pixel changing.
Chrome’s engineers suggest trying it alongside AVIF, the other modern picture format, and expect JPEG XL to be “most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images.” Firefox can show the format only in its Nightly test version for now, so a site offers the JPEG XL picture with an ordinary JPEG behind it, and each browser takes the one it can show. Nobody sees a broken image.
Why it mattersFor a site whose subject is its pictures, such as a photographer, a hotel or a fashion label, the big photographs can now go out at higher quality for the same file size in Chrome and Safari, with an ordinary JPEG kept for everyone else.
Photography website design: examples and trends →
Sources: Chrome for Developers: Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome · Chrome Status: JPEG XL decoding support · WebKit: Features in Safari 17.0 · Chromium: remove JPEG XL support (2022) · Can I use: JPEG XL