Since moving from a flat fee VPS to a pay for what you use web host, I’ve noticed, my photos section is big.

400MB doesn’t sound crazy on the surface, but when you’re paying $1/GiB-Month in storage fees, you start noticing it. To be clear, I’m still paying less all in for both my sites than the VPS I was using. But, if I make my photos smaller, I pay less.

I really, really wanted to convert everything to JPEG-XL. JXL is a wonderful image standard ready for the future. But Google won’t support it. At all. Because they had a hand in AVIF, which I also looked at. But Hugo can’t pull exif data out of it. That left webp, but Lightroom Classic ¹ doesn’t support exporting to webp.

I ended up going with webp, as it’s better supported (cough google cough) and Hugo can pull exif data from it. Yeah Lightroom can’t export to it, but a couple extra lines in my image import script ² fixed that ³.

So, how much space did I save. Well, my photos site nlp.photos went from 400MB to 92MB. I say that worked.