Hi.
What image format is better for the wallpapapers?. What is the default format for the wallpapers included with Ubuntu?.
Thanks in advance.
Regards.
PNGs are often of higher quality and use lossless compression. The main trade-off is size, so JPGs typically have a smaller footprint. For wallpapers, both work perfectly well on Ubuntu. Usually the desktop ships with a mix of both.
3 Likes
Expanding a little on @aaronprisk, JPG is usually a better choice for photographs: the smaller size is helpful and the lossy compression is not as noticeable. PNG looks better for digital art with a more limited color palette.
Regarding wallpaper images, I will assume you are referring to interactive response resulting from that memory space being reserved.
Basically, whether you use
- a “raw” format like PNG, or
- a “compressed” format like JPEG,
there is no in-memory performance difference, once it is loaded!
- They will BOTH use up exactly the same total memory bits to correspond to the image pixel count (xxxx wide by yyyy tall).
The only difference, performance-wise, is the load time, which is a single hit at initial load. The larger the file, the longer to load from disk to memory. The other consideration is that a compressed image, depending on complexity, could itself also take a long time to be processed to transfrom from compressed to decompressed (a.k.a. “raw”) form which is then kept as “persistent” memory-resident format. The disadvantage of a compressed image has nothing to do with performance … and all to do with re-composition quality.
So in the end, it only boils down to whichever format is simpler for you to manage, based on your prioritizing and doing the trade-off of
- image file quality at display, vs
- storage size on disk.
Personally, I have a large library of JPEG files for various things, but when it comes to files that are intended for use as wallpapers, I prefer to acquire those in their original PNG format.
I hope that clarifies and gives you the knowledge to be “Master in your own house!”
2 Likes
A little side note: GNOME also supports SVG for wallpapers (but that indeed only makes sense for vector graphics anyway, not for photographs or similar, but it can save a lot of space)
2 Likes
Thank you for the information. I’d always wondered if the end result was, as you say, to use the same amount of memory! That’s useful to know.
A tiny correction: PNG isn’t raw; it’s lossless. Raw (often spelled as uppercase RAW) specifically refers to the unedited, unprocessed output from a digital camera, and usually ends with the extension .dng.
2 Likes
Does ubuntu support webp as wallpaper?
Thanks in advance.
Depends on your release, IIRC the webp-pixbuf-loader package was added to the default install after 22.04, a system that has this installed will also be able to use webp on the desktop …
1 Like
I’ve just tested this on 24.04 with both AVIF and WebP. The answer is yes, both are supported.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.