• JPG, originally JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group.

• The file name for a JPEG image is .jpg or .jpeg.

• There is actually no difference between JPG and JPEG, except for the number of characters used.

• JPEG is the most commonly used format for photographs. It is specifically good for color photographs or for images with many blends or gradients. However, it is not the best with sharp edges and might lead to a little blurring. This is mainly because JPEG is a method of lossy compression for digital photography.

• An advantage to using the JPEG format is that due to compression, a JPEG image will take up a few MB of data.

• This means that while saving the image in a JPEG format, there is a slight loss of quality due to compression. Hence, JPEG is not the greatest format in case one needs to keep making numerous edits and re-saves to the image.

• As with each re-save there a slight loss of quality due to compression. Still, if one only makes a few edits and the image is saved in a high quality format, the slight loss of quality due to compression is mainly negligible.

• The JPEG is quite popular for web hosting of images, for amateur and average photographers, digital cameras, etc. This is mainly due to the fact that high quality images can be saved using less space.

• JPEG is one of the most common image formats proposed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group to save and store digital images.

• The file format is referred to as the JPEG file interchange format (sort for JIFF) that was created for the sole purpose of storing digital images, particularly the ones used by digital photography.

• Almost all high-definition digital cameras including modern-day Smartphone cameras use JPEG file extension to store image files.

• One downside of JPEG is that it’s a lossy compression algorithm which significantly reduces the size of the file with each compression, which results in degradation of image quality.

• Like ZIP files exploit the redundancies in files to achieve utmost compression, JPEG does that by removing blocks of pixels or sections of images, thereby reducing image quality.

• Technically, it compares each pixel with adjacent pixels to adjust the compression ratio.

• This results in loss of density in digital photography, making it less appropriate for those trying to make a lot of edits and resaves to the image files.

• With each save, there’s a slight loss of image quality due to compression. It can be saved with both JPG and JPEG file extensions.

Difference between JPG and JPEG

• Operating System of JPG and JPEG

 The previous versions of operating systems such as MS DOS and Windows could only read three letter extensions for image file formats so the Joint Photographic Experts Group ditched the word “E” from JPEG to use JPG. However, there’s no such limitation in Macintosh. So JPEG is a common file format among Mac users.

• Number of Characters

 Both JPG and JPEG are often used interchangeably because they are virtually same and developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, however, the main difference between the two is the number of characters used in each file extension. Both are a little distinct file extensions with some association with JPEG-handling.

• File Size of JPG and JPEG

 The size of the image files with JPEG extension is comparatively less because of the lossy compression algorithm which results in a significant data loss. On the contrary, JPG makes the most out of the compression method to preserve the image quality with less data redundancy.

• Image Applications of JPG and JPEG

 Most of the image editing and processing applications such as Microsoft Paint and Adobe Photoshop use “.jpg” extension for saving all the JPEG image files for both Mac and Windows users. Both the file formats are ideal for digital photography with perfect variations of tones and colors such as art paintings.