Riviera Blog

Next to my jpegrot directory (see previous entry) is a directory called jpegrot, which I almost deleted thinking it was an old version of the same. In fact it’s quite different as it contains scripts and pictures I produced to play with JPEG’s lossy compression:

Above: 2 pictures saved with JPEG’s “quality” value set to 100, 8 and 1 (left-to-right).

Below: iterated compressions. An image is converted from GIF to JPEG and back, 0, 1, 50, 100, 200 and 500 times.

Nothing very impressive, but it looks kind of cool. If this blog had a proper logo, I’d run it through a conversion every day and watch it decay to blackness.

I wonder if there’s a photoshop plug-in that produces this.
When you think about it, many unwanted effects produced by lossy reproduction methods have eventually reappeared later, intentionally, usually to add some sort of a retro style.

To name a few, analog TV on CRT screens (XanalogTV), vinyl cracking (ever so popular), MP3’s lossy sound (heard in Radiohead’s Kid A, for instance), GSM compression (as a LASDPA audio effect), are all available as some sort of filter in audio or video software. So it wouldn’t be too surpising if JPEG’s blockiness also became available one day, and also perhaps audio tape hissing, VHS colours or any other weakness that people have complained about in the past but which they will soon enjoy again.

I’ve found myself reviving this tool I wrote 2 years ago. It’s a simple utility that allows you to interactively rotate JPEG files. It looks for any Exif orientation information to automate the rotations but let you override it.
I’d stopped using it for more powerful tools but got increasingly frustrated by them. As the size of picture files gets bigger, it takes longer and longer to rotate them. And it’s annoying to sequentially go “look at picture, decide if I want to keep it, correct the orientation, wait for the big file to be rotated, and repeat. What jpegrot does is “look, decide, correct, repeat” and only at the end “wait while all the big pictures are rotated”. The waiting at the end is obviously long but is much less annoying as you can just go and do something else.

So now it’s back! I updated the code to match the latest Gtk API and added buttons to let you delete pictures.

New version available for Linux, requires Gtk2, libexif, jpegtran. License: GPL.