"There is much debate about how aware the primitive minds were of the degradation of their information. Did they believe older things looked worse when they were photographed or did they understand it was their photographs themselves that got worse over time?

Even more surprising is that their oldest media wasn't even able to maintain any information at all about colour."

Could be. I’m not as familiar with that format – a major strength of png is that anything can open and view it properly. It’s been a standard for decades, so it has universal compatibility.

e: I’m not going to look into that specific format (I stopped caring about the inner workings of file formats like 15 years ago when I stopped getting paid to care), but I think I could bet you that webp is a document hierarchy wrapper on png, jpg, gif, mpeg, etc, ad inf.

I had to exit this comment and look again because I couldn’t remember if you’d said webm or webx or webp or whatever. The last I knew, that’s not a file format but a codepage (nowadays, that’s usually a cheap wrapper over code they found and repackaged).

That’s massively simplified, but if you’re asking that in this thread, I’m worried people are being sold a difference that doesn’t exist.

Slightly larger file size, which mattered in like 2002, but it’s only a few mb, which doesn’t matter at all now.

e: if you’re a professional photographer and saving stupidly high resolution images by the thousands, you’ll want to use jpg, but in that case, you’ll understand why.