- It isn't really a "new format". It's an update to the existing format. - It is very backwards compatible. -- Old programs will load new PNGs to the best of their capability. A user will still know "that is a picture of a red apple".

There also seems to be some confusion about how PNGs work internally. Short and sweet: - There are chunks of data. -- Chunks have a name, which says what data it contains. A program can skip a chunk it doesn't recognize. - There is only one image stream.

Assuming Next gen PNG will still require new decoder. They could just call it PNG2.

JPEG-XL already provides everything most people asked for a lossless codec. If there are any problems it is its encoding and decoding speed and resources.

Current champion of Lossless image codec is HALIC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38990568

Probably the best news here. While you already can write custom data into a header, having Exif is good.

BTW: Does Exif have a magnetometer (rotation) and acceleration (gravity) field? I often wonder about why Google isn't saving this information in the images which the camera app saves. It could help so much with post-processing, like with leveling the horizon or creating panoramas.

Curious if Animated SVGs are also a thing. I remember seeing some Javascript based SVG animations (it was a animated chatbot avatar) - but not sure if there is any standard framework.

There is just no need for a PNG update, just adopt JPEG XL.

Try opening a HEIC or AV1 or something on a machine that doesn't natively support it down to the OS-level, and you're in for a bad time. This stuff needs to work everywhere—in every app, in the OS shell for quick-looking at files, in APIs, on Linux, etc. If a codec does not function at that level, it is not functional for wider use and should not be a default for any platform.

"photo scanned in 2025, is about something in easter, before 1940 and after 1920"

[0] https://svgees.us/blog/cICP.html

> Many of the programs you use already support the new PNG spec: ... Photoshop, ...

Photoshop does NOT support APNGs. The PR calls out APNg recognition as the 2nd bullet point of "What's new?"

Am I missing something? Seems like a pretty big mistake. I was excited that an art tool with some marketshare finally supported it.

This worries me. Because presumably, changing the compression algorithm will break backwards compatibility, which means we'll start to see "png" files that aren't actually png files.

It'll be like USB-C but for images.

Back then, there were no libraries in C# for it, but it's actually quite easy to make APNG from PNGs directly by writing chunks with correct headers, no encoders needed (assuming PNGs are already encoded as input).

https://github.com/NightElfik/Malsys/blob/master/src/Malsys....

https://marekfiser.com/projects/malsys-mareks-lsystems/

Surely they aren't releasing a new, incompatible version and expecting us to pretend it's the same format...?

> This updates the existing image/png Internet Media type

whyyyyyyy

> PNG is pronounced “ping”

See the end of Section 1 [0]

0: https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-png.pdf

Society doesn't need a new image format. I'd wager to say not any new multimedia format. Big corporate entites do, and have churning them out at a steady pace.

Look at poor webp - a format pushed by the largest industry players - and the abysmal everyday use it gets, and the hate it generates.

Lossless AVIF is not competitive.

However, lossless WEBP does not support indexed color images. If you need palettes, you're stuck with PNG for now.

After 20 years of success, we can't resist the temptation to mess with what works.

Pleasantly surprised.

I did skim through the specs, it seems most of it is related to cleanup and optional blocks, so it seems PNG is still safe, am I wrong? (asking those who did dive into the new specs deeply).

Is this written exactly for (1) people who implement/maintain this and, I say this with love, (2) nerds. Or will there be effects outside of a microscopic improvement on storage + latency.

But you can absolutely have an SDR image encoded using a large color space. So I am not sure why the author talks about color primaries when it tries to justify HDR… I still don’t know what kind of HDR images this new PNG variant can encode.

PNG is popular with some Commercial Application developers, but the exposure and color problems still look 1980's awful in some use-cases.

Even after spending a few grand on seats for a project, one still gets arrogant 3D clown-ware vendors telling people how they should run their pipeline with PNG hot garbage as input.

People should choose EXR more often, and pick a consistent color standard. PNG does not need yet another awful encoding option. =3

!!!