What? How am I obsessive? I don’t see what you’re talking about… 😅

Let me tell you the story!

As usual, I’m working on something of my own, in my little corner… After releasing Coupéo, I needed an internal tool to test an idea… 💡

And the thing is, to make this idea work, I’ll need to store, and more importantly distribute, thousands, even tens of thousands of images… 📸

(You might have seen a short video about it on my socials 😝).

Anyway, the thing is, it’s going to consume bandwidth (I love bandwidth! I love it! 😆).

Why am I thinking about this already? Well… in the summer of 2025, I released LFMaps, a small project I built for Coupéo (on the hairdresser pages, there’s a map showing where they’re located — pretty cool, right? 😁).

And instead of keeping my OpenFreeMap instance (what’s behind LFMaps) to myself, I thought:

“Hey, how can I make this accessible to others?” 🌍

LFMaps went online in August 2025, and now it’s November 2025.
There are already 11,000 regular end users on LFMaps (people who see the maps in their browsers).

And the bandwidth? 60 gigabytes per month! Sure, compared to big companies, that’s tiny — but it’s just a small project launched by an indie three months ago… So what will it be in a year? 😮

Anyway, back to our project: the images will be stored in three formats — JPG, WebP, and AVIF.
JPEG and WebP are mostly there for compatibility with older browsers 🧓

But here’s the thing — during my tests, I set all three formats to 90% quality, and… the AVIF files were heavier than my WebP ones! 😅

Huh? What’s going on there?

Well, after doing a few tests and benchmarks, I found out that an AVIF at 70% quality gives the same visual quality as a WebP at 90%, while being about 30% lighter 📊

So, to really keep things light, I convert to AVIF at 60% quality.
That gives me great-looking 1920p images at around 250 KB each.

Not bad, right? (I don’t think that’s French, though 😆).

(It' a french private joke like "C'est pas mal non ? c'est français")