What is the effect of encoding an image in base64

Question

If I convert an image  jpg or png  to base64  then will it be bigger  or will it have the same size  How much greater will it be   Is it recommended to use base64 encoded images on my website

User · Answer

It will be bigger in base64  Base64 uses 6 bits per byte to encode data  whereas binary uses 8 bits per byte   Also  there is a little padding overhead with Base64   Not all bits are used with Base64 because it was developed in the first place to encode binary data on systems that can only correctly process non-binary data  That means that the encoded image will be around 33 -36  larger  33  from not using 2 of the bits per byte  plus possible padding accounting for the remaining 3

User · Answer

It will definitely cost you more space  amp  bandwidth if you want to use base64 encoded images  However if your site has a lot of small images you can decrease the page loading time by encoding your images to base64 and placing them into html  In this way  the client browser wont need to make a lot of connections to the images  but will have them in html

User · Answer

Here s a really helpful overview of when to base64 encode and when not to  by David Calhoun   Basic answer   gzipped base64 encoded files will be roughly comparable in file size to standard binary  jpg png    Gzip d binary files will have a smaller file size   Takeaway   There s some advantage to encoding and gzipping your UI icons  etc  but unwise to do this for larger images

User · Answer

It will be approximately 37  larger      Very roughly  the final size of Base64-encoded binary data is equal to 1 37 times the original data size   Source  http   en wikipedia org wiki Base64

User · Answer

The answer is  It depends   Although base64-images are larger  there a few conditions where base64 is the better choice   Size of base64-images  Base64 uses 64 different characters and this is 2 6  So base64 stores 6bit per 8bit character  So the proportion is 6 8 from unconverted data to base64 data  This is no exact calculation  but a rough estimate   Example   An 48kb image needs around 64kb as base64 converted image   Calculation   48   6    8   64  Simple CLI calculator on Linux systems     cat  dev urandom head -c 48000 base64 wc -c 64843   Or using an image     cat my png base64 wc -c   Base64-images and websites  This question is much more difficult to answer  Generally speaking  as larger the image as less sense using base64  But consider the following points    A lot of embedded images in an HTML-File or CSS-File can have similar strings  For PNGs you often find repeated  A  chars  Using gzip  sometimes called  deflate    there might be even a win on size  But it depends on image content  Request overhead of HTTP1 1  Especially with a lot of cookies you can easily have a few kilobytes overhead per request  Embedding base64 images might save bandwith  Do not base64 encode SVG images  because gzip is more effective on XML than on base64  Programming  On dynamically generated images it is easier to deliver them in one request as to coordinate two dependent requests  Deeplinks  If you want to prevent downloading the image  it is a little bit trickier to extract an image from an HTML page

User · Answer

Encoding an image to base64 will make it about 30  bigger   See the details in the wikipedia article about the Data URI scheme  where it states      Base64-encoded data URIs are 1 3 larger in size than their binary equivalent   However  this overhead is reduced to 2-3  if the HTTP server compresses the response using gzip

[html] What is the effect of encoding an image in base64?

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