Why do image and video quality worsen the more they are saved and uploaded? What contributes to this?
In: Technology
Saving and uploading files doesn’t affect quality. Our computers would be useless if we couldn’t reliably transfer exact copies of data. What causes quality to drop is when you’re 1) using a lossy compression algorithm such as JPEG or MPEG, and 2) repeatedly re-compressing the same file.
If you open a JPEG in an image editor like MS Paint, it has to decompress the image to show you the pixels. When you save, it needs to re-compress the file. Do this multiple times and it will lose quality each time.
Upload the image to an online service, and the site itself may also re-compress the image. Sometimes they do this so their images are in a consistent file format or resolution, or are below a certain file size.
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