We’ve moved from AVC to HEVC and VP9 relatively quickly, but for some reason images are stuck in JPEG, PNG, and GIF despite newer formats like JPEG2000 and HEIC having been around for years? Videos are just images displayed very quickly, shouldn’t the adoption pace of image/video formats be similar?
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There is usually not a practical necessity to compress still images as much as possible. We have enough disk space and network bandwidth. Video is almost always visibly degraded out of necessity, and a better format can allow to bump its quality.
It’s also convenient to be able to display a large photo quickly because the compression is simple and doesn’t place much load on the processor. For example, to generate thumbnails for great many files. New formats are many times slower. This was more important when JPEG-2000 was created. New formats usually only target low bitrates, and may not scale to transparent quality, because they have implicit chroma subsampling. Their decoding speed is typically proportional to the bitrate.
Compatibility with old graphics editors is important too. An old version of Photoshop may have cost a lot of money in the past, is free from subscription fees and still fulfills most needs.
New formats are heavy encumbered with licensing, and usually receive an implementation only in new versions of expensive software. Free software may get clunky non-native plugin at best. JPEG-2000 and related wavelet formats usually had paid plugins in free viewers.
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