We may be familiar with JPG, TIF, PNG or PSD image formats, among others. Sending images through WhatsApp, email or uploading them to various networks has been standardized, but not many people can differentiate between JPG and JPEG files. Next, we will tell you what their differences and similarities are.
The Difference Between JPG and JPEG
We often hear about JPG and JPEG, and we think they are the same image format. Although they are very similar, they have their differences. Both arose to solve an existing format problem. JPEG files are born from the need to lighten the size of the files without losing quality. To understand it, we will have to dig a little deeper into the subject. Explaining what a JPEG file is and why over time it has ended up having more than one denomination, such as JIF or JPG.
What is JPEG?
The explanation is somewhat technical, but it will help to understand the differences between JPG and JPEG.
JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. In 1992 ISO (International Organization for Standardization) published for the first time the JIF standard born from the acronym JPEG Interchange Format. This qualification received its name from the Committee that created it.Â
JPEGs are 24-bit raster images. They are images formed in RGB (Red, Green, Blue), and each of these channels has 8 of those bits. As these are small image formats, there is no room for a fourth alpha channel. This means that, although they can represent up to 16 million colors, they do not support transparency.
Benefits of Using JPEG format
The advantage of using this type of format is that when saving it in JPEG, information is discarded, occupying between 50% and 75% less. So we can say that they are lossy compression formats. Something very significant if we compare them with other formats such as BMP, where the loss of image quality was zero.
The JIF could be considered the purest form of a JPG, but, on the contrary, it is an obsolete format that complained of being used due to the problems and limitations it presented when defining the color and appearance of the image pixels. These gave rise to other formats such as Exif and the well-known ICC color formats.
So What’s the Difference Between JPG and JPEG?
The only difference we can find between JPGs and JPEGs is simply the nomenclature. It is the same image format, and the name change is due to differences between the operating systems districts.
In the past, the first versions of Windows only allowed three characters in the nomenclatures of their extensions. This happened on MS-DOS 8.3 and FAT 32 file systems. Hence, they had to shorten to JPG. The same did not happen in systems such as Linux and MAC where that limitation did not exist, and they continued to use the extensions in their Primal form, maintaining the E.
