The “Wrong Choice”

Art with Few Colors Saved as JPEG

This is not a total disaster in terms of file size, but image quality may very well suffer, as you can see below:

GIF file size: 5,693 bytes

JPEG file size: 7,487 bytes

Photos Saved as GIF

This is always a lose-lose situation; you lose quality when your color range is reduced from 16 million plus down to 256, and the file size will almost always become much, much larger.

Following are closeups of the balloon; the one at the left is the JPEG, and the one at the right is from the same photo stored as a GIF. Note the loss of quality in the lower image.

Below are thumbnails of two photos saved both as GIF and JPEG, along with the file sizes of the full-size pictures. Notice the explosion in file size that comes with a bad choice of format.

837 x 765 pixels JPEG file: 128,286 bytes GIF file: 334,163 bytes

367 x 361 pixels JPEG file: 36,698 bytes GIF file: 99,488 bytes