Two parrots
Look at the feathers and the bright colour.
Examples
See the difference for yourself.
Every photo here was saved twice at the same file size: once as Pop, once as JPEG. Drag the line across each one, and switch between low, medium and high quality.
Bearded vulture
Look at the feathers and the soft background.
Rio de Janeiro at sunset
Look at the sky and the distant city.
Gazania flower
Look at the strong colour and fine petals.
Montreal skyline
Look at the windows and straight edges.
Photos: Kodak test image (parrots, 768×512) and Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (the rest, scaled down whole to 768×432). Every photo uses the same three Pop quality settings; each JPEG was made with libjpeg-turbo at its default settings, without Huffman optimization, at the highest quality whose file is no larger than Pop’s. The images shown are lossless copies of what each format decoded to.
Room to spare
How many photos fit?
Two phones with the same storage. We put the same photos on each until one is full.
Same phone. 60% more photos.
The same 105 photos fill the JPEG phone but take 38% less space as Pop, leaving room for about 60% more pictures on the phone, laptop or cloud storage you already have.
Benchmarks
How Pop stacks up.
Pop against JPEG, HEIC and AVIF on size, quality and speed. HEIC and AVIF squeeze files a little harder; Pop gets close while saving photos in a blink.
38%smaller than JPEG at the same quality
140×faster than AVIF to save a photo on a Mac
1.5×faster than HEIC to save and to open on iPhone
File size for the same picture
Smaller is better. JPEG = 100. Average of 24 standard test photos at equal quality.
Quality at the same file size
Higher is better. SSIMULACRA2 score, average of 8 photos at a medium size. HEIC not measured.
Time to save a photo · Mac
Lower is better. 768×512 photo, all cores. HEIC not measured.
Time to open a photo · Mac
Lower is better. 768×512 photo, all cores. HEIC not measured.
Time to save a 12 MP photo · iPhone
Lower is better. iPhone 15 Pro Max. AVIF not measured.
Time to open a 12 MP photo · iPhone
Lower is better. iPhone 15 Pro Max. AVIF not measured.
Mac: Apple M4 Pro; JPEG is libjpeg-turbo, which runs on one core. iPhone: iPhone 15 Pro Max, with Apple's own JPEG and HEIC at quality 0.85. Size and quality: averages over standard test photos. Gaps mean that pairing was not measured.