Guides
Short, practical explanations of how JPEG compression actually works — and how to get smaller files without wrecking your images.
- Why Did Compressing My Image Make It Bigger?
It happens more often than people expect, and it is not a bug in the tool. Here is what is really going on — and what a compressor should do about it. - JPEG vs PNG vs WebP: Which Format Should You Use?
A decision table for the three formats that cover almost everything, and why the right answer depends on where the image is going rather than on quality. - How to Reduce JPEG File Size Without Losing Quality
A practical guide to shrinking JPEGs while keeping the detail that matters, including the one encoder setting most online tools get wrong. - What Is Chroma Subsampling? (4:4:4, 4:2:2, 4:2:0 Explained)
Why JPEG stores colour at lower resolution than brightness, what the ratios mean, and when you can safely give up colour detail. - JPEG Quality Settings Explained (and What Numbers to Use)
What JPEG quality values actually control, why quality 80 is not "80 percent", and the ranges that work for photos, screenshots and print. - How to Compress a JPEG to an Exact Size (200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB)
Upload forms, email servers and government portals all cap file size. Here is how to hit an exact target in KB instead of guessing at a quality slider — and what to do when the target cannot be reached. - PNG or JPEG for Screenshots? (And How to Shrink Them)
Screenshots are text, flat colour and sharp edges — the worst case for JPEG and the best case for PNG. Here is which to use, and how to make a PNG screenshot far smaller without visible damage. - What Does Chroma Subsampling Cost? We Measured 323 Images
Same image, same quality, only the colour sampling changed: SSIMULACRA2 fell from a mean of 87.8 to 82.7, and every single image got worse. Here is the method and the numbers.