11/14/12--Digital Media

When you log onto a website, the first thing you want to see is that it has things that attract and interest you. For most people, that appeal comes from bright colors and pictures. While the color scheme of the website will be light blues and pinks, the pictures on the website are the colors that really count.

Just like with audio files, large image files need to be compressed for transmission and storage. When it comes to compression, two types of compression are available. There is "lossless" and "lossy". Lossless is where the decompression process can restore the image data identical to its original form. Lossy is where original data cannot be restored, but the image, to varying degrees, looks much like the original (e.g. jpeg compression).

On "rent-a-cat", the type of compression we will use is "lossy" compression. By use of a Jpeg, we will upload the photos for easy internet streaming of pictures. Jpeg is incredibly popular for computer and internet applications because of variable compression. The compression is on a scale of 100 on down; starting at 99, there is very high quality with little compression. It still causes a slight, though usually unnoticeable degradation over the uncompressed image. When the image is at 25 or lower, it is very low quality, but it is highly compressed.

While admittedly the JPEG has problems, it seems to do the trick for the website. By using an easy, effective method to compress photos, "rent-a-cat" will have no issues publicizing photos to the public.