Image sizes. If the camera settings stays the same and the image is stored as a set of pixel values, why does the image size change?

Question

On my smartphone, the largest image is around 8mb and the smallest in the same camera settings is around 2mb (images of different objects though). Why is there such a huge difference in image size?

In:

Answer 1

The images are likely being compressed.

Say for example you take a picture of someone in front of a flat white wall. Uncompressed the photo file would have to explicitly store that every single individual pixel of the wall is white, while a compressed file would store “all the pixels between *here* and *here* is white.

Uncompressed: 1, white 2, white 3, white 4, white…

Compressed 1 – 4, white.

Photos of highly varied and colorful scenes can’t be compressed as much and therefore the file is larger.