2im

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

2im (or twim) is a new image compression format.

JPEG, GIF and PNG are the most popular image formats in the web. PNG is used mainly used for lossless encoding, GIF supports animated images, and JPEG is perfect for lossy photos encoding...

But modern responsive web has one more use-case: embeddable image previews. 2im has been designed exactly for that: encoding 64 x 64 image preview into 200 bytes... Or 192 x 192 picture into twitter message...

Unlike most other codecs, the main parameter for codec is not some abstract quality, but output size (in bytes). Encoder will try to find the best representation that fits the bit budget.

Moreover, simple image format allows fast and small JS decoder (just 1881 bytes / 1089 when compressed with Brotli).

See also: comparison with SQIP primitive art.