While browsing the internet or while using our digital cameras or even our mobile phones, we come around many image formats such as JPG, JPEG, WEBP or PNG. We have a very scant idea of what these mean, are they similar or is there any difference in between them? Today we will explain to you the difference between JPG & JPEG image formats.
What is the difference between JPG and JPEG?
There are is no major difference between the two file extensions, both are image formats and are interchangeable and mean the same thing. The only noticeable difference between them is the difference in the number of characters in them.
- JPEG – It is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and this was created as the standard by the ISO(International Standards Organisation) in 1992. This filetype is used for lossless image compression for digital images, especially by digital cameras and our mobile phone cameras. The compression ratio typically achieved by JPEG is around 10:1 with a noticeable decline in quality and JPEG is a bitmap compression format.
- JPG – There is absolutely no difference between the two, except for the number of characters in the two. JPEG has 4 characters while JPG has 3 characters. The only reason this three-letter format exists because on the older Windows systems such as the MS-DOS 8.3 and FAT-16 file systems, required a three-letter extension for the file names, hence the .jpg. But Unix systems such as Mac and Linux did not have this limitation, so they never had the .jpg extension. Now the modern Windows versions do not have this restriction but still, the .jpg extension is much more popular than its counterpart and still is used in many programs. Even the photo editing Softwares such GIMP and Adobe Photoshop still save images in the .jpg format in both Windows and Mac systems.
In Windows Paint, we can notice that while we try to save an image, the formats .jpg and .jpeg along with .jpe and .jfif are mentioned alongside each other which implies they are all the same image file formats with just the difference in the number of characters in them.
According to Wikipedia, there are also some more different extensions in which the JPEG format is denoted like .jpe, .jif, .jfif and .jfi. All of these formats do loose some of their quality when an image is saved due to their lossless nature. But because of their smaller file size, they are popular on websites because smaller size helps the websites to load faster.
