Old forum thread from 2005 made me realize I was wrongly blocking good photos all along

I was going through some old bookmarks on the Wayback Machine last week and found a photography forum thread from 2005 about image compression. For years I had been saving all my digital photos as JPEGs at the lowest quality setting to save hard drive space. I thought I was being smart, but the thread explained how that destroys the subtle color details in shadows. Then I saw side-by-side examples from someone named 'digiDan' showing the difference between a quality 8 and a quality 3 JPEG of the same sunset photo. The cheap version had blocky artifacts in the sky that I never noticed before. Now I have to go back and re-scan about 400 old family photos from 2002 to 2008. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized you were ruining your own archive for years without knowing it? And what quality setting do you use for your personal photo backups?

2 comments

2 Comments

claire99218d ago

Oh man, this hit close to home. I did the same thing with my music collection about ten years ago. I ripped all my CDs as 128 kbps MP3s because I thought it would save space and nobody could tell the difference. Then I finally sat down and compared a song at 128 vs a lossless file on good headphones, and the cheap version sounded hollow and flat. It made me sad thinking about all those years I could have been listening to better quality. For photos, I landed on JPEG quality 10 for anything I care about, and I keep raw files too now. I also used to save everything as medium resolution to fit more on a CD, but that was dumb too. Once you hear or see the difference, you can't unsee it, and it stings a bit knowing how much you missed out on.

tessa_kim318d ago

2005 is pretty late to be learning that honestly, but I get the impulse. I keep most of my stuff at quality 7 or 8 and honestly I can't tell the difference on my laptop screen or when I print 4x6s. You might be overthinking this unless you're planning to blow them up poster size someday.