Image Quality Budgets and CI Gates 2025 — Operations to Prevent Breakdowns

TL;DR

• Set thresholds in stages by use case (thumbnails/hero/high-definition)
• Establish operations where metrics are supplementary—final judgment is visual inspection
• Automatic rollback/re-encoding flow when budget deviations occur

Internal links: Image Quality Metrics SSIM/PSNR/Butteraugli Practical Guide 2025, Ultimate Image Compression Strategy 2025 — Practical Guide to Optimize User Experience While Preserving Quality

Background

In real-world scenarios, "quality degradation/size bloat happening without notice" is common. By incorporating budgets and metrics into CI, we stop silent progressive degradation.

Scope Design (Which Assets to Protect)

• Classification: Thumbnails (listings) / Hero (LP) / UI (logos/icons) / Product details (zoom support)
• Different objectives: Thumbnails prioritize transfer volume/cache efficiency, hero focuses on visual quality, UI demands pixel precision
• Define "capacity budgets," "quality gates," and "color management policies" for each

Examples:

• Thumbnails: Average ≤ 25KB (AVIF/WebP), SSIM ≥ 0.98, LPIPS ≤ 0.08
• Hero: Average ≤ 180KB, Butteraugli ≤ 1.2, color gamut normalized to sRGB
• UI/Logos: Lossless as needed (WebP/PNG), no subsampling (4:4:4)