isr.co.ro : glossary JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) A standard for compressing and decompressing images. The JPEG standard allows a slight loss of what should be unimportant picture detail in return for smaller compressed file sizes and faster processing. In most cases, the difference will be slight to invisible between this "lossey" method and a "lossless" method that restores the information exactly. Because of its favorable tradeoff between quality and compressed-file size, JPEG has become one of the most popular formats for compressed images in Usenet newsgroups and e-mail attachments, and it's becoming increasingly popular on World Wide Web pages as well. Most Web browsers now support JPEG images directly, through a "plug-in," or through an external helper application. The actual industry group that met together to come up with this compression standard.