Joint Photographic Experts Group

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is the original name of the committee that was established in 1986 to design and standardize the JPEG image compression algorithm, which is widely used on the web.

Description
Introduced in 1992, JPEG is designed for compressing full-color or grayscale digital images of "natural", real-world scenes. It does not work as well on non-realistic images, such as cartoons or line drawings. JPEG does not handle compression of black-and-white bitmaps, indexed color images, or moving pictures. Standards for compressing those types of images are handled by other committees, named and MPEG.

History
JPEG was supported by Adobe Photoshop before Apple added native support for JPEG to the Mac with the release of QuickTime 3.0 in March 1998.