.JPG File Extension

In the early 1980s, no technology existed that allowed users to easily compress and share digital images with one another. In 1982, the JPEG workgroup began designing a compression standard that could be used to reduce image files' size, making them easier to share, while retaining as much of their quality as possible.

In 1992, the workgroup created the JPEG file format. JPEG files, which are most commonly saved using the .jpg or .JPEG extension, are images created using a lossy compression algorithm, which actually destroys some data contained within the original image file. However, this data loss is mostly unnoticeable to the human eye. Because the JPEG standard continues to allows users to produce sharable, high-quality image files, and because it is so embedded within technologies used to create and share images, it is still the most common image compression standard in use today.