When the initial preview version of ImageZero (IZ) had been announced, many readers were interested in benchmarks against other compression algorithms, such as JPEG-2000 or Google’s new lossless WebP. At that time, however, the WebP software was not yet ready for testing; it was not possible to benchmark the decompression time, because the software could only convert back to PNG (and PNG encoding is known to be slow), and the compression crashed on large photos.
Luckily, the 0.2 version of the WebP tools has been released, and with this, the Lossless Photo Compression Benchmark has been updated to include results for WebP and ImageZero. Here are the most interesting results:
| Software / License | Size (% of 3.46 GB) | Compression | Decompression |
|---|---|---|---|
| uncompressed | 100.0% | – | – |
| bzip2 -1 (bzip2 License) | 56.3% | 476 s | 218 s |
| PNG (libpng License) | 42.5% | 844 s | 72 s |
| ImageZero (BSD) | 41.3% | 23 s | 21 s |
| JPEG-LS (HP License) | 37.4% | 107 s | 92 s |
| lossless WebP (BSD) | 35.6% | 7525 s | 110 s |
| Flic (proprietary) | 30.0% | 210 s | 231 s |
| Gralic (proprietary) | 28.1% | 1734 s | 1897 s |
Keeping Computing Personal 
So will you be writing a KDE/Qt image plugin for ImageZero?
I would be interested to see how this could speed up our desktops, for example by using ImageZero for our icons and thumbnails stored in ~/.thumbnails. Have you tried something like this?
Those numbers are very impressive! Does it support the alpha channel as well now?
Next up is really using this in applications 🙂
How does it compare if you run WebP with lower quality settings, like the high speed settings of -q 0 -m 1 used on https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_lossless_alpha_study