this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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What the hell is an .avif format? Anyway, you can just save it as .png and that works.
png is completely the wrong format for photos.
Not arguing that PNG is the right choice, but you want something lossless for science purposes, and this is a science image.
You can tell roughly what order the impact craters were formed by seeing what overlaps what; looks like the small impacts mostly followed the big impacts. Maybe the earth's orbit cleared out the bigger stuff first? If you had a really good image, you might be able to work out the average impact angle, and therefore the average speed of impact, since we know the speed of the moon, and how they would intersect. Nothing's filled with lava like it has on the near side of the moon, which makes me think these have mostly happened later in the moon's life, when it's cooled down a bit.
I just love space, I've no education in it. I bet someone with a fancy moon science degree would be able to tell you a lot more, and they'd be poring over every pixel. Don't want any JPEGs getting in the way of that.
Why's that?
The short answer is size. Longer answer is because of how the compression works and it's not what it was designed for. PNG are more suited to graphics.
I've been using it as a sort of litmus test for AI images. Even at a high quality setting, AVIF compresses them down to almost nothing.
Something to do with the lack of natural "jitter" in AI images and the way AVIF has been designed to perfectly deal with this.
The diffusion models at least were basically designed to "remove noise from a random image until a real image emerged" so that actually makes a lot of sense, interesting
Oh guess the AI folks haven't yet realized that you can increase perceived accuracy by adding a small amount of random noise.
Which of course they didn't, because then they'd need to understand some things about images instead of just throwing whatever data they can find at it and hoping it figures it all out from that.
Though I'm not sure how much it applies to images, as the examples I've seen were audio. But it's cool to hear a low bitrate audio sample of someone talking unintelligibly and then play that same clip with random noise also playing and suddenly you can understand what is being said.
It's a very efficient royalty-free codec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIF?wprov=sfla1
It's a .webp file for me.
Chances are the program you're using supports all this crap, and ignores the extension anyway, because far too many people just rename files to "convert" them.
Only real way to be sure is to open it with a hex editor. The first few bytes will tell you what a file type really is.
Lemmy probably returns images in different formats depending on what client supports (and ones with better compression take precedence).
It's probably the best open format for pictures, based on the AV1 codec. Better compression than jpeg and can do lossless with better compression than png as well.
Jpegxl gang
Native iOS image format I think, AV1 derived?