A JPG, also called JPEG, is the most popular digital format for photographic image files.  JPEG is an acronym for the Joint Photographic Experts Group who first developed this standard for digital photography in 1992.  The digital file extension .jpeg and .jpg are interchangeable.  Most often you'll see the digital file represented as *.jpg, but most people pronounce the file as a "Jay-Peg" image.

The JPG is a widely popular standard for digital photography because of it's compression.  This can be as much as 10 to 1, and results in a much smaller file size than other digital image standards.  Because of this smaller file size, and the speed that the file can travel across the internet, the JPG image has proliferated dramatically since the early 2000s.  There are well over a billion JPG images being produced every day from the billions of mobile devices operating globally.

There are other standards for digital image files, namely the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) and the TIFF (Tagged Image File Format).  Each digital file format has trade offs of costs and benefits.  For instance, the JPG is considered a "lossy" form of compression, and is not well suited to image files that undergo multiple edits.  Some image quality is lost each time the file is recompressed.  However, JPG image quality is not effected by opening and closing the file repeatedly.

JPG is the perfect image format for sharing your favorite photos with family and friends.  You can choose a variety of JPG image resolutions, but higher resolutions result in larger files and higher costs.  The 300dpi standard is a perfectly acceptable resolution for viewing files on most digital screens, but Heirloom recommends a 600dpi resolution to allow for good quality on larger displays.

The JPG digital image file is extremely resilient and moves across the connected world at the speed of light.  As digital data, it can be copied and stored in multiple locations, further increasing it's life expectancy to what one might consider indelible.  This has lead to a worldwide boom in photo scanning to copy old printed photographs, photo negatives, and photo slides into a digital format.

If you still need to scan your old photos to digital, consider getting started with Heirloom.  Once received at their digitization facility in northern Virginia, Heirloom will sort, count, and provide an exact quote to scan all that you send.  They even send a digital sample for you to approve quality before paying for the service.  Prices start at only $0.15 per image, and there's no need to precariously remove printed photos from adhesive pages in an photo album!

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