HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format
This seems conceptually most similar to Fabrice Bellard's proposal 'BPG' [1], which was essentially a lightweight wrapper around an HEVC I-frame. The format got small amounts of attention in encoding circles, but didn't pick up mainstream traction.The image encoding layer of HEIF is the same HEVC, but the container is MPEG-4 Part 12 (the Quicktime-descendant ISO Base Media Format; the core behind .mp4, .3gp, etc.), which theoretically gives it wide support. In this structure, HEIF supports image sequences, which will help it compete with animated GIF, GIFV (which is really just a short MPEG-4 Part 14 file containing usually an H.264 video track), animated WebP (who uses these?), and WebM.This format doesn't really blaze new ground (EDIT: it does in the sense that it defines a container format to express image-y constructs like still images and sequences of images in an ISO media container, but see my other comment that asks how this is similar but different to video [3]), but if this repackaging and the resulting code donation and political clout helps it gain traction, we still would gain a lot.The problem, of course, is always with backwards-compatibility. WebP was aggressively promoted by Google the same way Microsoft used to promote its quirky Windows Media formats back in the early 2000s, but the WebP and non-WebP camps are still largely separate. This is unfortunate, because WebP in my opinion really isn't very good, and a backwards-compatible compressor on top of JPEG, such as Dropbox's Lepton [2] achieves similar results. Any HEVC-based image compressor is necessarily incompatible with JPEG; so broad buy-in would be required from makers of software and hardware products, from operating systems, file managers, image viewers, image editors, cameras, and the like, to really enjoy its improved compression rates, vs. being just another incompatible format that only functions inside controlled ecosystems.The video codec AV1 currently in development was supposed to be a grand alliance of disparate companies to agree on a common format for the future, and rectify the WebM vs. non-WebM split, but continuing to promulgate sophisticated formats based on work outside of this scope (such as MPEG- or ITU-derived custom formats) just muddies this further.[1] https://bellard.org/bpg/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230805
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490734