Since I moved to broadband internet I've become less dedicated to image file sizes. That changed when I noticed that many files were coming out much larger than I expected from my image editing software... preview functions might say an image would be 9kb and then the file might come out at 18kb!

After searching for information about this, I realized that the extra data was information my digital cameras had appended to JPEGs... for example, all camera settings like shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc., were stored with the JPEGs. That information could add up.

I found a utility that will clean this information from JPEGs. It's called the JPG Cleaner, a free program produced by Rainbow Software. It's a very simple and useful utility to optimize images for the web. Sometimes the extra non-image data in your JPEG is larger than the image information!

I find the extra information useful for my hi-res photo collection. But when posting to the web, it's a good idea to delete the extra, unused data.

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2011-11-07 When I posted this article, I was in the habit of reducing my images as much as possible (which is why many of the photo pages from this period and earlier always have small images and few larger ones you can enlarge). I no longer worry about this as much since broadband internet is growing.

However, there are still reasons to reduce the file sizes. I know that many of the mainstream image editors can do this natively now (like Corel PHOTO-PAINT)... but if you don't have access to them this is still a nice alternative.