Why do image and video quality worsen the more they are saved and uploaded? What contributes to this?
In: Technology
Many of the common file formats use various forms of ‘lossy’ compression, which means that they reduce the file size by discarding some of the information contained in the image/video. So each time you save the file again it gets compressed again, and more data is lost. The algorithms that they use are designed to keep the data that’s most important to the image quality, but they’re not perfect, so over multiple save/compression cycles, more and more of the original image is lost and the amount of weird compression artifacts grows.
There are ‘lossless’ compression file types/algorithms, but they generally don’t reduce file sizes nearly as much.
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