JPEG XL is a modern, royalty-free image format that offers significantly better compression than traditional JPEG files while maintaining high-quality visuals.
Unlike other image formats such as HEIC, AVIF, and WebP, JPEG XL is specifically designed to give photographers greater control over their work. Interestingly, the aforementioned file extensions actually originate from video codecs.
Apple has reportedly added native support for JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 series to attract more photographers. If you’re using one of these devices and have set your image format to JPEG XL, you’ll need to enable support for this format in Windows 11 as well.
While Apple provides native support for JPEG XL through OS updates, Microsoft has opted to offer it as an extension via the Microsoft Store.
Users who need to work with this format must download the additional extension from the Microsoft Store.
To download the extension, simply visit the Microsoft Store page here.
As mentioned earlier, JPEG XL is considered the successor to the outdated JPG format. Despite this, it remains as user-friendly as JPG and avoids compatibility issues seen with formats like HEIF and AVIF.
However, JPEG XL excels in compression efficiency, helping users save up to 75% on storage while supporting a wider color gamut. Additionally, it offers faster encoding and decoding processes.
In general, the image quality of JPG and JPEG XL (.jxl) is comparable, but JXL files are significantly smaller in size.
Opening JPEG XL files can still be tricky, as they only appear as thumbnails in File Explorer and cannot yet be opened in the Microsoft Photos app, even with the extension installed.
However, Microsoft may release updates in the future to enable direct support for this format in Microsoft Photos.
Via: Windows Latest
