About JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
JPEG has been the default way to store photographs since the Joint Photographic Experts Group published the standard in 1992. It uses lossy compression that discards detail your eye is unlikely to notice, trading a small amount of fidelity for dramatically smaller files. Every camera, phone, browser, operating system, and image editor made in the last three decades can open it.
Use JPEG when you need a photo that works everywhere: email attachments, web uploads, application forms, listing photos — anything a recipient must open without thinking about it. It is a poor fit for screenshots, logos, and text-heavy graphics, where its compression leaves visible smudging around sharp edges, and it has no transparency support at all.
Convertmaxxing converts images to and from JPEG entirely in your browser — free, no signup, and nothing is ever uploaded. You can also strip EXIF metadata, such as GPS location, on the way out.
Strengths
- Opens everywhere — the most widely supported image format ever made
- Small files for photographs, with quality you can tune to fit any size budget
- Fast to encode and decode, even for large images
- Decades of tooling — every editor, viewer, and pipeline handles it
Limitations
- Lossy: discarded detail is gone for good, and quality erodes with every re-save
- No transparency support
- Visible artifacts around text, line art, and sharp edges
- Outclassed on size by modern formats — WebP and AVIF are much smaller at the same quality