If you had any contact with digital images before – may it be on a website or Facebook, or when dealing with photographies – you have surely heard of JPG files. If you have paid attention to the file extensions, however, you might have seen it written in different ways before. The usage of JPG or JPEG files may cause confusion. That’s what we are here for.
Today, we have a look at the question: what’s the difference when it comes to JPG vs JPEG?
About JPG & JPEG Images
In general, there is no big difference between JPG and JPEG images. In fact, the extensions are used interchangeably. Thus, let’s first have a look at the similarities between the two file extensions.
- Both files are raster images (in contrast to vector image files).
- JPG, as well as JPEG, stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.
- They are both commonly used for photographs (or derived from camera raw image formats).
- Both images apply lossy compression which results in a loss of quality.
- But this also results in these image files having a quite small file size.
Why The Difference Then?
If both image formats or extensions are, essentially, the same, why are there different extensions then? And why is it that, on the same computer, both .jpg and .jpeg images can exist?
This difference stems from the inability of older Windows versions to support file extensions that are different from a three-letter format. While Mac computers and newer Windows computers can handle files with the .jpeg extension, computers with an older Windows operating system needed the shortened, .jpg extension. By now, most image processing programs save JPG files with the .jpg extension on all kinds of operating systems just to avoid confusion.
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