TahJeeFuh246 Posted:

My question was actually direct to IRL issues, Wyl. Many of my images are jpegs, and I’d like to know just what it is that happens to them that causes them to degrade.

not all compression algorithms save information perfectly in order to get better performance or speed

this is called lossy compression and is used by jpg and mp3 among other formats

lossless compression gives better quality especially over repeated decompression/compression

so dont re-edit jpgs if you have a choice keep an editable copy in a lossless form like psd if you are using photoshop

but like i said lossless compression tends to make larger files and can even create files larger than the original data if the data is arranged badly for the algorithm

for a comparison take a wav (generally uncompressed an huge) and convert it to mp3 and to flac and see the difference