why is it that when a digital picture is loading on a monitor it shows up blurry and then clear instead of showing up top to bottom like a printed out picture?
In: Technology
It’s a technical choice.
The vast majority of digital pictures online are JPEGs.
JPEG offers two different ways of encoding and ordering the data in the file:
* A **baseline** JPEG will load from top to bottom like a printer. (Fun fact: You can make one load from bottom-to-top or side-to-side if you want.)
* A **progressive** JPEG will load a very low-quality version of the image and then successively higher quality ones.
I think it’s also possible, in Javascript and CSS code, for an author to make a webpage intentionally load very low quality versions of images that are off-screen, and only load the higher quality versions when you scroll down to them.
Latest Answers