Wouldn’t a camera with a constant resolution capture images of the same quality and therefore file size? How is it possible that some images on my camera can be 1.5 MB, and others 2.5 MB?
In: Technology
The data from your camera is not 1.5MB or 2.5MB. It is much more data than that, probably at least 40MB or more. But some of the data is thrown out (some extra pixels that are blanked out and only used to determine the noise of the sensor, and some of the extra bits to make sure the camera can record the brightest and darkest areas), then the images are compressed. Compression algorithms are quite complex but to drastically over simplify if you can find patterns in the numbers and short them down to make them smaller, you can save a lot of space. The problem is that two different images with two different sets of data will compress quite differently so one image might be able to get substantially smaller than another. JPGs, HEIF/HEIC, WEBP files are all compressed file formats that try to make the files smaller, but depending on the photo they will be able to compress them at different levels.
RAW files (which are supposed to be the data directly off the sensor) may be more similar in file size, but even those can sometimes be compressed to make them smaller and will vary a little (though they usually try to avoid “lossy” compression so the variation will not be as great). TIFF files often are uncompressed (they can be but it’s less common) and will more often be the same size or very close when coming from the same camera if they aren’t cropped differently (there will be minor differences for metadata).
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