Behold FLIF!
Better than BPG!
http://flif.info/
But beware:
WARNING: FLIF is a work in progress. The format is not finalized yet. Any small or large change in the algorithm will most likely mean that FLIF files encoded with an older version will no longer be correctly decoded by a newer version. Keep this in mind.
And
FLIF does not yet support the following features:
- Metadata (EXIF, ICC profiles, XMP, …)
- Other color spaces (CMYK, YCbCr, …)
- Lossy compression
- Web browser support
- A highly optimized implementation
Where do most images come from ? Taken by cameras, and what format do they use ? Most jpg (with numerous RAW formats). How many photos are taken every year ? Billions (old data so most likley even greater http://www.popphoto.com/news/2013/05/how-many-photos-are-uploaded-to-internet-every-minute). Are cameras going to switch to one of these new formats ? No.
jpg is not going away and it will still be the dominant image format by far.
Do we really need to have Blender cram in support for as many image formats as humanely possible, chances are that some are never going to take off and will instead just fade into obscurity (so the development time spent on its support gets wasted).
Afterall, given that at the moment none of these nice new formats are estabilished, they are not so important in 99% of workflows.
Though one of them (FLIF?) could be interesting if used when packing 8/16 bit images into .blend files.
I don’t see this as replacing anything soon because…
But yeah, it would be nice to have another useful format available. Particularly if it can get close to png quality while compressing better.