When you work with images and photographs online, you've probably seen both JPG and JPEG extensions. Choosing the appropriate image file format can be confusing because you don't know which one to use.
Choosing the right image file format for your images can save you valuable hard drive space and speed up your website's loading time.
You will learn how JPG and JPEG differ and which file type is better for your project in this article.
Which Is Better, JPG or JPEG?
JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group is the name of the file extension JPEG. In 1992, ISO released its first standard. This is a bitmap compression format that is mostly used for lossy compression, with compression ratios ranging from 10:1 to 20:1. It is possible to adjust the compression ratio, so you can determine the balance between storage size and quality. In digital cameras and photo-sharing devices, the JPEG extension is most commonly used.
In addition to being excellent for color and photographs, the JPEG format does suffer from a slight loss of quality due to compression. It might be negligible, but editing and re-saving only degrade the quality. One way to minimize this is to work with the RAW JPEGs, determine your edits, and then save the final version without re-saving it multiple times.
For JPEG images, the MIME type is image/jpeg (defined in RFC 1341), except for older versions of Internet Explorer that use image/pjpeg for uploading JPEG images. Additionally, JPEG is defined with the extensions .jpe, .jif, .jfif, and .jfi.
JPG
Next, we have the JPG format. In fact, there is no difference between JPG and JPEG. There is only one difference between the two: the number of characters. It is only because MS-DOS 8.3 and FAT-16 file systems required a three-letter extension for JPG file names that they exist. As a result, .jpeg was shortened to .jpg. Users of UNIX and MAC continued to use the .jpeg extension even though Windows and DOS had this limitation. In recent Windows versions, more characters have been added to the file extension. However, .jpg was already being used by most people (and most programs needed to work with MS-DOS 8.3), so it is still the most common extension.
JPEGs are saved by default on Windows and MACs by photo editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Gimp. The file will continue to work even if you change the extension both ways.
Summary
There is no difference between JPG and JPEG, as you can see. In earlier versions of Windows or DOS, the JPG file extension was limited to three letters. Since both JPG and JPEG have small file sizes and vibrant colors, you can convert your photos into both types.
Are you finding it as easy as you thought to choose between JPG and JPEG?