best image compression/format

[sebsteinig]

Given that the future weather data will be at much higher resolution than our BRIDGE data, I think it would be worth to think about the best image format for our data conversion. I just used PNG so far because it was the easiest solution for me.

One alternative I saw is WebP. It provides both lossless and lossy compression options and resulting images are around 25% smaller than PNG/JPEG (https://developers.google.com/speed/webp). It seems the Python library Pillow that we currently use can also directly output to WebP (https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/handbook/image-file-formats.html) and the JS library can read WebP metadata (https://www.npmjs.com/package/exifreader?activeTab=readme). So I guess this could be a good alternative to PNG with relatively easy implementation?

We could also test different levels of lossy compression with WebP to find a good tradeoff between file size and quality of frontend graphics.

You also mentioned AI image compression? Would this be a possibility as well? Would this be a topic either of you would be interested to explore?