JPEG (or JPG)

For sharing full-color photographs, the best and most popular format to use is normally JPEG. It is pronounced " jay-peg".

The name comes from the group who developed the format. It stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.

Usually a JPEG file will have a file extension, such as

These images are highly compressed and are encoded in full color so it is a very efficient and thus, popular format for photographs or other images that have a wide selection of colorization.

The disadvantage to this format is that the compression islossy. What this means is every time you read a JPEG file to make a change, no matter how minor of a change, and write the file back to the disk, the image quality is slightly degraded. It is recommended that you do not use JPEG file for images that you plan to edit over and over again. Other than that, JPEG files are the norm. There is no quality loss when you copy the file from one place to another or when it is downloaded from one computer to another, only when you edit it and write it back to the disk.

If you are thinking, "My camera stores images as JPEGs so does that mean I am losing quality?" The answer is YES! That is why you may see an option for a non-lossy raw format. That being said, JPEG files are so much smaller that you are able to store many, many more images than is possible for raw mode images on your same memory card.