Changelog

Optimization history

PicEditLab is actively maintained. This is an honest, running record of the tools, formats and quality improvements we ship — so you can see exactly how the product evolves over time. Newest first.

Reviewed by PicEditLab Engineering Team Last updated July 2026
July 19, 2026 Latest

Quality controls arrive on HEIC, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR

  • Quality slider on four more format pages. HEIC, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR now get the same preset chips as JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF — Maximum, High, Balanced, Compact or Smallest, or drag anywhere on 0–100. Balanced (75) stays the safe default; raise to 85+ to stay close to the original, drop to 60 for previews and sharing.
  • Each format is tuned to its real encoder. Under the hood the slider drives heif-enc's --quality for HEIC (offset by 15 stops, since iPhone originals are already encoded near-max and the file only actually shrinks after dropping a notch), cjxl's perceptual --distance for JXL, opj_compress's target ratio for JP2, and JxrEncApp's 0–1 quality for JXR. The top step on JXR is truly mathematically lossless (pixels stay identical); the other three land at near-lossless.
  • Same controls on the all-format compressor. Mixed uploads that include these formats now share one consistent quality UI, alongside the existing JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF options.
  • Format aliases handled transparently. Uploads to the HEIF or J2K variants pick up the HEIC and JPEG 2000 quality controls automatically — no separate configuration.
  • The after-compress "recompress" tip covers these formats too. If you started from the unified page and want to tweak quality, the follow-up prompt on the download screen now points back to the matching HEIC / JXL / JP2 / JXR page.
July 3, 2026

WebP quality controls, matched across both compressors

  • Quality slider on WebP compression. Same preset chips as JPG and PNG — Maximum, High, Balanced, Compact or Smallest, or drag anywhere on 0–100. Balanced (75) is the sweet spot for web use; drop to 60 for thumbnails and previews, raise to 85+ when you want to preserve photographic fidelity. WebP is more efficient than JPEG at the same visual quality, so the defaults sit a bit higher than JPG.
  • Same WebP controls on the all-format compressor. The chip-style panel now appears alongside the existing JPG, PNG and GIF options, so mixed-format uploads share one consistent quality UI.
July 2, 2026

JPG & PNG quality controls, tidier compression view

  • Quality slider on the JPG and PNG landing pages. Same preset chips as GIF — pick Maximum, High, Balanced, Compact or Smallest, or drag the slider anywhere on 0–100. Defaults now match the backend at 60 (Balanced).
  • Cleaner working view after upload. Once you drop in a file, the hero, format description and SEO explainer collapse away so the file list and compress button sit at the top of the screen. The quality panel drops in right under the compress button — adjust and re-run without scrolling. Clearing all files restores the landing page.
July 1, 2026

JPG & PNG compression — fewer failures, smoother on big files

  • Fixed: some JPGs were silently skipping compression. Certain camera exports and high-resolution product photos used to come back unchanged instead of getting compressed. They now process correctly, and large images go through faster with noticeably lighter server load.
  • Fixed: mislabeled files weren't compressed. When a file's extension didn't match its actual format — for example a JPG that had been renamed to .png — the compressor used to skip it entirely. It now recognises the real format and compresses anyway, while keeping the original file extension unchanged.
  • Cleaner transparent-to-JPEG output. Transparent areas now flatten to white when saved as JPEG, so cut-out product photos no longer pick up a dark edge along the cut-out.
  • Fixed: HDR (EXR) compression barely shrank many files. High-resolution HDR photos and environment maps used to come back only slightly smaller — or occasionally larger. They now compress properly, and the result opens without issues in macOS Preview and other standard viewers.
  • Sharper GIF output on single-frame photos. Photo-style GIFs (single frame, no animation) used to come back visibly softer than the original because the shared smoothing step tuned for animated GIFs was flattening fine detail. We now detect single-frame GIFs and skip that step, so photos keep their crispness. Animated GIFs continue to use the same pipeline as before.
  • GIF quality & color settings are now on the landing page. Quality and max-color controls sit right under the upload area, so you can pick a preset before uploading — and they stay visible after upload for quick re-runs.
  • Steadier processing across less common formats. Tightened memory limits behind the BMP, ICO, TGA, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, QOI and RAW pipelines, so an unusually large upload in one of these formats won't push the server toward its memory ceiling.
June 29, 2026

Image resizing, RAW & EXR compression, and real vector tracing

  • Image resizing is live. Launched a dedicated resize tool — change dimensions by pixels or percentage with aspect-ratio lock and ready-made presets. It's also wired into the "continue editing" steps after compressing or converting.
  • RAW compression. Camera RAW files (DNG, CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, ORF, RW2, RAF and more) are now compressed to a smaller lossless DNG using dnglab, with a JPEG fallback when needed.
  • OpenEXR compression. Added compression for high-dynamic-range EXR images.
  • Raster-to-vector SVG. Image-to-SVG conversion now uses VTracer to trace shapes into real, scalable vector paths — with clear guidance on when vectorization works well and when it doesn't.
  • Image to PDF. Each image is rendered onto its own PDF page at 150 DPI, with honest notes about what a PDF export does and doesn't do.
  • Smarter internal links. Compress and convert pages for the same format now link to each other, so it's easier to find the right tool for a file.
  • Index hygiene. Trimmed low-intent, near-duplicate conversion pages from search indexing so the genuinely useful pages stand out.
May 26, 2026

Started building the resize tool

  • Began development of the image resizing feature.
May 8, 2026

Format conversion launched

  • Shipped image format conversion — a wide range of input formats to 14 output formats, including modern formats like AVIF, HEIC, JXL and WebP.
May 5, 2026

Started building format conversion

  • Began development of the conversion engine.
April 20, 2026

PicEditLab went live

  • Launched with image compression. We kept refining compression quality and adding format coverage in the weeks that followed.
April 1, 2026

Project kickoff

  • Started designing and building PicEditLab — a fast, free, privacy-first image toolkit that runs entirely in the browser flow with no sign-up.
We only list changes that actually shipped. The "Last updated" date you see across the site always points to the most recent entry here.