Hello, and welcome. Heart Photos now has a blog, and this is its first post.
Heart Photos is a photo library and a wall to show it on. You upload an image, it is converted to a modern format and made in the right sizes for each screen, and the original is kept so you can always download it again. You choose who sees each image: only you, anyone with the link, or everyone on the public wall.
Building that means working with image formats, compression, storage and sharing every day. We keep learning things that are useful to anyone with a lot of photos, and this is where we will write them down.
What you will find here
A new post most days, each one answering a real question plainly:
- Image formats. AVIF, JPEG XL, WebP, HEIC, PNG and JPEG: what each is good at, and what works where.
- Keeping photos safe. Storing originals, backing up a library, and getting your images back out again.
- Sharing and privacy. Galleries, links, and the difference between private, unlisted and public.
- Faster pages. How to serve the right image size to each screen.
- Getting more from Heart Photos. Practical guides to tags, search, galleries, the Chrome extension and the API.
How we will write
The answer comes first, so you do not have to scroll for it. When we give a number, it either links to its source or we measured it ourselves and say how. When something has limits, including something of ours, we will tell you.
Our first real post does exactly that: we ran 40 JPEGs from the public wall through AVIF and JPEG XL and published the sizes. Read it here: AVIF vs JPEG XL vs WebP.
How to follow along
Paste the Atom feed into any feed reader and new posts will come to you. Or come back to the blog now and then; the newest post is always first.
Thanks for reading.