Subject: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or
photo, the better quality it will have?

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.
Pasted to ms-paint, Save. All those 3 or 4 steps are needed to save a
graphic off the web, right?

It chose .png. Later I used Save As and chose JPEG. Then I looked at
one and saw that it only filled the upper left corner and there was also
a lot of white space, so I went back to Paint and moved the lower right
corner to where it matched the image and there was no white space. I
saved it again in .png and .jpg.

Now I have 4 files. The .png file with the extra white space is
254K and without is 330K about 40% bigger.
The .jpg file with the extra white space is
77K and without is 66K. 14% smaller.

I would expect them both to be smaller without the white space.

Any ideas about this?


It also offers .bmp and GIF. Any special reason to use one of those
instead? I don't even know where I will use this graphic but I liked
it and I'm saving it, for unknown future uses.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or photo, the better quality it will have?

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.

Better option is to "Save Image as..." and save the file directly to your computer. No need to faff with MS Paint.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On 8/21/26 4:26 PM, Chris wrote:

micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or
photo, the better quality it will have?

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.

Better option is to "Save Image as..." and save the file directly to your computer. No need to faff with MS Paint.

Ditto, skip the MS Paint. Goodness knows what it's doing.

Also PNG is a lossless image. No loss of dots. 2nd, jpg is a lossy. Loses dots.

--
Mint 22.3, Thunderbird 153.0esr, Firefox 153.0.4
Alan K.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On 8/21/26 2:28 PM, micky wrote:

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or photo, the better quality it will have?

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.
Pasted to ms-paint, Save. All those 3 or 4 steps are needed to save a graphic off the web, right?

It chose .png. Later I used Save As and chose JPEG. Then I looked at
one and saw that it only filled the upper left corner and there was also
a lot of white space, so I went back to Paint and moved the lower right corner to where it matched the image and there was no white space. I
saved it again in .png and .jpg.

Now I have 4 files. The .png file with the extra white space is
254K and without is 330K about 40% bigger.
The .jpg file with the extra white space is
77K and without is 66K. 14% smaller.

I would expect them both to be smaller without the white space.

Any ideas about this?

It also offers .bmp and GIF. Any special reason to use one of those
instead? I don't even know where I will use this graphic but I liked
it and I'm saving it, for unknown future uses.

A larger file is not necessarily a better quality pic. I can put a pic in Photoshop and
scale it up to 10,000 x 10,000 and it will be a huge file. But if I started with a
500x500 dot image, Photoshop is going to make up the other 9,500 x 9,500 dots. You can't
get a free picture, despite what you see on NCIS where they can clear up a photo and you
can read that license plate from 500yds away.

Also, a larger file size can just be the results of compression, optimization, and program
(which accounts for the other 2 usually).

--
Mint 22.3, Thunderbird 153.0esr, Firefox 153.0.4
Alan K.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:37:42 -0400, "Alan K." <alan@invalid.com> wrote:

On 8/21/26 4:26 PM, Chris wrote:

micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or
photo, the better quality it will have?

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.

Better option is to "Save Image as..." and save the file directly to your
computer. No need to faff with MS Paint.

Ditto, skip the MS Paint. Goodness knows what it's doing.

I guess I wanted to see what I was saving before I saved it, but I can
both look at it and copy it directly. Or I can copy it and then display
what I copied.

Also PNG is a lossless image. No loss of dots. 2nd, jpg is a lossy. Loses dots.

Very good to know. I may have read this once but it doesn't sink in
until I actually need to know it.

Thank you both and thaks for your other answer, too, Alan.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On 2026/8/21 19:28:52, micky wrote:

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or photo, the better quality it will have?

Within the same format, yes. But (as one of the other posters has said,
despite what you see on TV dramas [though you _can_ do it to some extent
by combining several frames from a video] you can't get more information
than there was in the original, you'll just make a bigger file for no
reason.

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.
Pasted to ms-paint, Save. All those 3 or 4 steps are needed to save a graphic off the web, right?

In my browser (Edge, but I think this applies to others too),
right-click then "save image as" will save the image capturing all the information available. I _think_ it uses whatever format the file was in originally, too, so not lose anything.

A side wrinkle - this applies on X (Twitter as was), but may apply on
other similar sites: if you right-click an image, choose "Open image in
new tab" (Edge - other browsers may vary or not have the option). Switch
to that tab, and look at the URL in the address bar. If that ends in
something like "&name=small" or "&name=900x900", change it to
"&name=large" and press enter; you probably won't _see_ any difference
if the browser is set to autoscale, but if you then save the image,
you'll get a better one. (X - and maybe other sites - display a reduced
image when just displaying as part of a tweet, to save bandwidth.)

It chose .png. Later I used Save As and chose JPEG. Then I looked at

Loading into Paint (or any image software) and then saving from that,
may alter (degrade) the image; direct save won't.[]

It also offers .bmp and GIF. Any special reason to use one of those
instead? I don't even know where I will use this graphic but I liked
it and I'm saving it, for unknown future uses.

In most cases, .bmp (bit-map) will store an uncompressed image - you
definitely won't _lose_ any content, but if the original file was
anything but .bmp in the first place, it'll be needlessly large. (I say
"in most cases" because you can create a greyscale .bmp, which obviously
loses information if the original was coloured.)

GIF (graphical interchange format) uses only 256 colours, but once it
has selected those, uses lossless compression (lossless means you can
restore and resave [as GIF] from the compressed image without losing
anything). It's not a fixed set of 256 colours across all images, but a different 256 for each image - if it's a sunset, it'll have a lot more
red, yellow, and orange than green and blue. You'd think 256 is enough
for most things, but for things with gradually-varying shading - faces sometimes, sunsets!, and certain others, "banding" is very noticeable; nevertheless, I sometimes use it, as once you've saved it once, you'll
lose no more by compression. It's excellent for certain limited-colour
images - company logos (if only blocks of colour rather than shading), cartoons, etc. - if they haven't been reduced in (pixel) size such that
lines use shading to blur.

JPEG/JPG/JPE (no, not my initials! joint picture experts group) is
lossy; usually, the corruption isn't visible, unless you zoom in a lot
(in my experience it's especially noticeable on edges, like the horizon,
if you zoom in a lot). Loading and re-saving a .jpg in any image viewer
will usually increase the distortion at each save - though only doing
that will; just copying the file outside of an image viewer/editor, of
course, will not. The compression usually makes for an amazingly smaller
file, compared to the raw (BMP - height ? width ? 3 bytes), or even the
GIF. I think it gets a bad rap, like mp3 for audio; I use it even for
many document images (I am a genealogist). Note that in most good image-handling software, you can vary the amount of compression used -
more compression makes a smaller file but a more corrupted image.

PNG (portable net graphics) is a more recent format; others in this
thread have said it uses lossless compression. It's _slightly_ less
universal (virtually everything can handle JPG, and that's still far
commoner).

I'd strongly recommend getting IrfanView for images - more versatile
than Paint, and works a lot more quickly, too - and has keyboard
shortcuts for many things. https://www.irfanview.com/ - get the plugins
(same page) too: you won't need them for most things, but you may as
well. I still would save images directly from the browser, but I often
paste them into IV too, just for a quick look, or to zoom, pan, etc..
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()ALIS-Ch++(p)Ar++T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

The beauty of a double entendre is that it only means one thing
- attributed to Ronnie Barker

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On 8/22/26 8:31 AM, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

On 2026/8/21 19:28:52, micky wrote:

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or
photo, the better quality it will have?

Within the same format, yes. But (as one of the other posters has said, despite what you see on TV dramas [though you _can_ do it to some extent
by combining several frames from a video] you can't get more information
than there was in the original, you'll just make a bigger file for no
reason.

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.
Pasted to ms-paint, Save. All those 3 or 4 steps are needed to save a
graphic off the web, right?

In my browser (Edge, but I think this applies to others too),
right-click then "save image as" will save the image capturing all the information available. I _think_ it uses whatever format the file was in originally, too, so not lose anything.

A side wrinkle - this applies on X (Twitter as was), but may apply on
other similar sites: if you right-click an image, choose "Open image in
new tab" (Edge - other browsers may vary or not have the option). Switch
to that tab, and look at the URL in the address bar. If that ends in something like "&name=small" or "&name=900x900", change it to
"&name=large" and press enter; you probably won't _see_ any difference
if the browser is set to autoscale, but if you then save the image,
you'll get a better one. (X - and maybe other sites - display a reduced
image when just displaying as part of a tweet, to save bandwidth.)

It chose .png. Later I used Save As and chose JPEG. Then I looked at

Loading into Paint (or any image software) and then saving from that,
may alter (degrade) the image; direct save won't.[]

It also offers .bmp and GIF. Any special reason to use one of those
instead? I don't even know where I will use this graphic but I liked
it and I'm saving it, for unknown future uses.

In most cases, .bmp (bit-map) will store an uncompressed image - you definitely won't _lose_ any content, but if the original file was
anything but .bmp in the first place, it'll be needlessly large. (I say
"in most cases" because you can create a greyscale .bmp, which obviously loses information if the original was coloured.)

GIF (graphical interchange format) uses only 256 colours, but once it
has selected those, uses lossless compression (lossless means you can
restore and resave [as GIF] from the compressed image without losing anything). It's not a fixed set of 256 colours across all images, but a different 256 for each image - if it's a sunset, it'll have a lot more
red, yellow, and orange than green and blue. You'd think 256 is enough
for most things, but for things with gradually-varying shading - faces sometimes, sunsets!, and certain others, "banding" is very noticeable; nevertheless, I sometimes use it, as once you've saved it once, you'll
lose no more by compression. It's excellent for certain limited-colour
images - company logos (if only blocks of colour rather than shading), cartoons, etc. - if they haven't been reduced in (pixel) size such that
lines use shading to blur.

JPEG/JPG/JPE (no, not my initials! joint picture experts group) is
lossy; usually, the corruption isn't visible, unless you zoom in a lot
(in my experience it's especially noticeable on edges, like the horizon,
if you zoom in a lot). Loading and re-saving a .jpg in any image viewer
will usually increase the distortion at each save - though only doing
that will; just copying the file outside of an image viewer/editor, of course, will not. The compression usually makes for an amazingly smaller file, compared to the raw (BMP - height ? width ? 3 bytes), or even the
GIF. I think it gets a bad rap, like mp3 for audio; I use it even for
many document images (I am a genealogist). Note that in most good image-handling software, you can vary the amount of compression used -
more compression makes a smaller file but a more corrupted image.

PNG (portable net graphics) is a more recent format; others in this
thread have said it uses lossless compression. It's _slightly_ less
universal (virtually everything can handle JPG, and that's still far commoner).

I'd strongly recommend getting IrfanView for images - more versatile
than Paint, and works a lot more quickly, too - and has keyboard
shortcuts for many things. https://www.irfanview.com/ - get the plugins
(same page) too: you won't need them for most things, but you may as
well. I still would save images directly from the browser, but I often
paste them into IV too, just for a quick look, or to zoom, pan, etc..

There's also a webp image format. Not sure about Window but I can view the 'saved as'
image and I can open in GIMP and resave as png.
Webp is really small and can be either lossy or lossless.



--
Mint 22.3, Thunderbird 153.1.0esr, Firefox 154.0
Alan K.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On 2026/8/22 13:58:32, Alan K. wrote:

On 8/22/26 8:31 AM, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

[]

In most cases, .bmp (bit-map) will store an uncompressed image - you

[]

GIF (graphical interchange format) uses only 256 colours, but once it

[]

JPEG/JPG/JPE (no, not my initials! joint picture experts group) is

[]

PNG (portable net graphics) is a more recent format; others in this
thread have said it uses lossless compression. It's _slightly_ less
universal (virtually everything can handle JPG, and that's still far
commoner).

[]

There's also a webp image format. Not sure about Window but I can view

the 'saved as'

image and I can open in GIMP and resave as png.
Webp is really small and can be either lossy or lossless.

There are other image formats too - I have a few .PCX, for example
(dating from 1992). Mostly obsolete (like .au for sound files), and
often not recognised by modern software.

IrfanView lists (as ones it can sometimes open) ANI, AVIF, B3D, BMP/DIB,
CLP, CRW/CR2/CR3, CUR, DCM/ACR/IMA, DDS, DJVU/IW44, DXF, ECW, EMF,
EPS/PS, EXR, G3, HDP/JXR/WDP, HEIC, ICO, IFF/LBM, JLS, JP2/JPC/J2K/JPF, JPG/JPEG/JFIF/JPE, JPM, JXL, MNG/JNG, PBM, PCD, PCX/DCX, PGM, PPM,
PSD/PSB, PSP, QOI, RAS/SUN, RAW, RLE, SFF, SGI/RGB, SID, TCA, TIF/TIFF,
WBMP, WEBP, WMF, XBM, XPM, SWF/FLV, TTF, ASF, AVI, MPG/MPE/MPEG, MOV,
WMV, AIF, MID/RMI, MP3, OGG, AU/SND, WAV, AND WMA, most of which I
haven't heard of. (Some are sound and video formats, which IV can
play/show, though it started as - and I still primarily use it as - an
image viewer/editor.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()ALIS-Ch++(p)Ar++T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

You cannot simply assume someone is honest just because they are not an M
P.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On Aug 21, 2026, micky wrote
(in article<8a4h8lpu0mu337gqgp90lej8ercgcc4rp6@4ax.com>):

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or photo, the better quality it will have?

Incorrect. There are a multitude of different file formats for images; TIFF files are huge, JPG files are much smaller, GIF files can be smaller than
JPGs but have other problems, PNGs are bigger than JPGs but can have better quality.

The ?quality? of an image is primarily determined by the bit level and
the resolution; GIFs top out at 8-bit, meaning that they can have, at most, 256 colors. TIFFS, PNGS, and JPGS can go to 24 or 32 bits, or higher in certain circumstances. 24 bit color is 16,777,216 colors. Obviously a color image is going to look better in almost anything not a GIF. The resolution is extremely important, too; typical images on the Web are 72, 96, or 100 dots per inch. Each dot would be displayed in the colors available, 256, 65,536,
or 16,777,216 depending on whether 8, 16, or 24 bit were used per dot. A 5?
by 4? image at 100 dpi would have 500 dots by 400 dots, or 200,000 dots. A GIF, being limited to 8 bits (one byte) per dot, would, depending on several factors, take up 200,000 bytes of storage. A JPG of the same image would take up three times the storage, or 600,000, as it would use 24 bits, three bytes, per dot... except that JPGs are compressed, so it?s not going to be
anything close to that. (A 32 bit JPG would be a maximum of 800,000 bytes,
but again not really, it?s compressed). A PNG is also compressed, just not
as tightly packed as a JPG, and so would be larger. A TIFF is not compressed at all. TIFFs are huge. (Note that the 200,000, 600,000, and 800,000 figures are max, most files won?t be that big.)

It is perfectly possible to have a high resolution GIF of something which works well in 256 or fewer colors and which looks better than a
low-resolution TIFF, and takes up less space. Furthermore, as both JPGs and PNGs use lossy compression, if you save a JPG or PNG a few times it will look noticably worse. (PNGs aren?t as lossy as JPGs. They?re still lossy.) If
you work with images, try to do everything using TIFFs or another non-lossy format, such as Photoshop PSD, and export to JPG or PNG as the final step. You?ll have an image pretty close to the original, but a lot smaller.

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.
Pasted to ms-paint,

Do NOT do that. Image quality will suffer.

Save. All those 3 or 4 steps are needed to save a
graphic off the web, right?

No. Just right-click, select save as image. You will have the image in the format set up on the web page, usually JPG or PNG. Note that some sites use webp, a Google image format which needs to die. If I get a webp I immediately convert it to a PNG.

It chose .png. Later I used Save As and chose JPEG. Then I looked at
one and saw that it only filled the upper left corner and there was also
a lot of white space, so I went back to Paint and moved the lower right corner to where it matched the image and there was no white space. I
saved it again in .png and .jpg.

you?re editing thee image. MS Paint is not the best image editor. The
Affinity image tools are free or cheap (max $60 last I looked, with afree option if you try) and are much better than MS Paint. Adobe?s tools are
also much better than MS Paint, but are neither free nor cheap.

Now I have 4 files. The .png file with the extra white space is
254K and without is 330K about 40% bigger.
The .jpg file with the extra white space is
77K and without is 66K. 14% smaller.

I would expect them both to be smaller without the white space.

Compression and resolution. you messed with one or both. God know what MS paint did.

Any ideas about this?

It also offers .bmp

do not use. MS has been trying to kill BMP for nearly two decades, for
several excellent reasons and a few extremely stupid reasons. Stay away

and GIF.

256 colors only. it will be smaller, but may not necessarily look the same.

Any special reason to use one of those
instead? I don't even know where I will use this graphic but I liked
it and I'm saving it, for unknown future uses.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On 2026/8/22 22:3:27, WolfFan wrote:

On Aug 21, 2026, micky wrote
(in article<8a4h8lpu0mu337gqgp90lej8ercgcc4rp6@4ax.com>):

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or
photo, the better quality it will have?

Incorrect. There are a multitude of different file formats for images; TIFF

Correct _within the same filetype_.

files are huge, JPG files are much smaller, GIF files can be smaller than JPGs but have other problems, PNGs are bigger than JPGs but can have better quality.

The ?quality? of an image is primarily determined by the bit level and
the resolution; GIFs top out at 8-bit, meaning that they can have, at most, 256 colors. TIFFS, PNGS, and JPGS can go to 24 or 32 bits, or higher in

GIFs use a paletting system, however; only 256 _different_ colours in
any one image, but each of those 256 can (I think always do) have three
bytes of colour information.

certain circumstances. 24 bit color is 16,777,216 colors. Obviously a color image is going to look better in almost anything not a GIF. The resolution is

Not _entirely_ true - for some things (especially things of limited
numbers of colours to start with), the lack of compression artefacts can
be good.

extremely important, too; typical images on the Web are 72, 96, or 100 dots per inch. Each dot would be displayed in the colors available, 256, 65,536, or 16,777,216 depending on whether 8, 16, or 24 bit were used per dot. A 5? by 4? image at 100 dpi would have 500 dots by 400 dots, or 200,000 dots. A

Any given image will look worse if its size in pixels is reduced, unless
it didn't need to be that many pixels in the first place (i. e. has been artificially made bigger in pixels). This is independent of the
compression (filetype).

GIF, being limited to 8 bits (one byte) per dot, would, depending on several factors, take up 200,000 bytes of storage.

No, because - after the reduction to 256 colours - GIFs have lossless compression.

A JPG of the same image would take
up three times the storage, or 600,000, as it would use 24 bits, three bytes,
per dot... except that JPGs are compressed, so it?s not going to be
anything close to that. (A 32 bit JPG would be a maximum of 800,000 bytes, but again not really, it?s compressed).

Note that the _amount_ of compression in a JPG can be selected, if the
graphics software has that adjustment. Digital cameras used to - maybe
still do - have "quality" settings, such as low, medium, and high, _as
well as_ resolution settings of fewer pixels than the sensor natively
has; these affect the amount of compression. IrfanView has a slider
control; I usually find the default setting of 80 produces acceptable
results (I don't know what the range is, nor how the figure relates to anything).

A PNG is also compressed, just not > as tightly packed as a JPG, and

so would be larger. A TIFF is not compressed > at all. TIFFs are huge.
(Note that the 200,000, 600,000, and 800,000 figures

are max, most files won?t be that big.)

I _think_ the TIFF format is a wrapper, and _can_ involve some
compression. It's not a common format these days, except from some
scanners; you're unlikely to find it on a web page.

It is perfectly possible to have a high resolution GIF of something which works well in 256 or fewer colors and which looks better than a low-resolution TIFF, and takes up less space. Furthermore, as both JPGs and PNGs use lossy compression, if you save a JPG or PNG a few times it will look

I thought that was the case; at least one other poster in this thread
has said PNGs are losslessly compressed.

noticably worse. (PNGs aren?t as lossy as JPGs. They?re still lossy.) If
you work with images, try to do everything using TIFFs or another non-lossy format, such as Photoshop PSD, and export to JPG or PNG as the final step. You?ll have an image pretty close to the original, but a lot smaller.

I'd agree - if you're repeatedly loading, working on, and saving an
image, don't use JPEG for the intermediate saves, though I'd say use
BMP, as that - though it'll produce huge files (but doesn't matter if
they're only intermediate stages you're not going to keep), they'll load quicker. Better, don't keep saving _and reloading_, but do all your work
_in_ the image prog.; while the image remains in the prog.'s memory,
it's not being compressed at all. (Do occasional saves in case you mess
up, but don't reload those unless you have to.)

Second, my subject line question: IIUC, I did the first part
correctly.... I saw a graphic on the web, right click, copy image.
Pasted to ms-paint,

Do NOT do that. Image quality will suffer.

Agreed - any save from an image software (Paint, IrfanView, Adobe, ...)
will cause degradation - _if_ it's in one of the lossy formats, such as
JPEG, PNG, or (probably) GIF. Even if it was originally in one of those formats, loading it into the graphics software involves decompressing it
- and there's no certainty that that software will save with exactly the
same compression (in fact it almost certainly won't).

You say "a graphic" - if it was something of a limited number of
colours, such as some company logos or some cartoons, then GIF _may_ not
lose anything. But best not to involve a graphics prog. at all, just use
"save image as" (or similar wording) from the browser.

Save. All those 3 or 4 steps are needed to save a
graphic off the web, right?

No. Just right-click, select save as image. You will have the image in the format set up on the web page, usually JPG or PNG. Note that some sites use webp, a Google image format which needs to die. If I get a webp I immediately
convert it to a PNG.

Though doing so involves a conversion and thus degradation :-) !

It chose .png. Later I used Save As and chose JPEG. Then I looked at
one and saw that it only filled the upper left corner and there was also
a lot of white space, so I went back to Paint and moved the lower right
corner to where it matched the image and there was no white space. I
saved it again in .png and .jpg.

(That does seem odd, and must be a function of how you captured the
image. Oh, by the way, never use screenshot, or grabber, or whatever it
or its variants are called this week - that nearly always involves
degradation too.)

you?re editing thee image. MS Paint is not the best image editor. The Affinity image tools are free or cheap (max $60 last I looked, with afree option if you try) and are much better than MS Paint. Adobe?s tools are
also much better than MS Paint, but are neither free nor cheap.

I'd say unless you're going to get seriously into image manipulation,
you don't need _any_ of the paid ones - I used to have an old version of
one of them that came "free" with something, but found I was using it
less and less compared to the free IrfanView, and when IV got a clone
brush (for photo retouching) (that was many years ago) I never used (it
was PSP) again. (There's another - also free - software that has the
same facilities as IrfanView but a different user interface - I forget
the name; might be FastStone or something like that.)

Now I have 4 files. The .png file with the extra white space is
254K and without is 330K about 40% bigger.
The .jpg file with the extra white space is
77K and without is 66K. 14% smaller.

I would expect them both to be smaller without the white space.

Though not much, because white space (or any large area of solid colour) compresses almost to nothing.>

Compression and resolution. you messed with one or both. God know what MS paint did.

Any ideas about this?

It also offers .bmp

do not use. MS has been trying to kill BMP for nearly two decades, for several excellent reasons and a few extremely stupid reasons. Stay away

and GIF.

BMP saves the original image data, at (usually) three bytes per pixel,
with no compression (lossy or otherwise); it thus produces larger files
than any other format. Apart from that, I see nothing wrong with it!
It's like saying don't use .txt when you can zip.

256 colors only. it will be smaller, but may not necessarily look the same.

Any special reason to use one of those
instead? I don't even know where I will use this graphic but I liked
it and I'm saving it, for unknown future uses.

If you _know_ the image has 256 or fewer colours, then GIF will store it
with no loss at all. GIF and JP(E)G are the most widely recognised and supported ones, though most things support PNG too these days. I use GIF
when I'm annotating screenshots and want to save intermediate results
I'm going to come back to later (to add more annotations).>
How big _is_ the image in question, in pixels? (Any image software will
tell you; browsers also used to, but Edge and other Chrome-based
browsers no longer show you the title bar where that information was
shown, unless you have an add-on that puts it back [I can send you one
such if you want]). And how many colours are in it? (IrfanView will tell
you - you just type I for info; other image software probably will too.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()ALIS-Ch++(p)Ar++T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

you can't blame boomers for everything. - Joe Queenan, RT 2023/6/24-30

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On Sat, 8/22/2026 9:42 AM, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

On 2026/8/22 13:58:32, Alan K. wrote:

On 8/22/26 8:31 AM, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

[]

In most cases, .bmp (bit-map) will store an uncompressed image - you

[]

GIF (graphical interchange format) uses only 256 colours, but once it

[]

JPEG/JPG/JPE (no, not my initials! joint picture experts group) is

[]

PNG (portable net graphics) is a more recent format; others in this
thread have said it uses lossless compression. It's _slightly_ less
universal (virtually everything can handle JPG, and that's still far
commoner).

[]

There's also a webp image format. Not sure about Window but I can view the 'saved as'
image and I can open in GIMP and resave as png.
Webp is really small and can be either lossy or lossless.

There are other image formats too - I have a few .PCX, for example
(dating from 1992). Mostly obsolete (like .au for sound files), and
often not recognised by modern software.

IrfanView lists (as ones it can sometimes open) ANI, AVIF, B3D, BMP/DIB,
CLP, CRW/CR2/CR3, CUR, DCM/ACR/IMA, DDS, DJVU/IW44, DXF, ECW, EMF,
EPS/PS, EXR, G3, HDP/JXR/WDP, HEIC, ICO, IFF/LBM, JLS, JP2/JPC/J2K/JPF, JPG/JPEG/JFIF/JPE, JPM, JXL, MNG/JNG, PBM, PCD, PCX/DCX, PGM, PPM,
PSD/PSB, PSP, QOI, RAS/SUN, RAW, RLE, SFF, SGI/RGB, SID, TCA, TIF/TIFF,
WBMP, WEBP, WMF, XBM, XPM, SWF/FLV, TTF, ASF, AVI, MPG/MPE/MPEG, MOV,
WMV, AIF, MID/RMI, MP3, OGG, AU/SND, WAV, AND WMA, most of which I
haven't heard of. (Some are sound and video formats, which IV can
play/show, though it started as - and I still primarily use it as - an
image viewer/editor.)

The .webp coverage on PCs is far from perfect, but we have
tools to do the conversion to something useful. Things
like JPEG or PNG, are more easily ingested by other tools,
as they're more mature formats and the other tools grew up
during that generation.

We can also handle one of the Apple formats, by using the
latest GIMP. I don't know if any video editor on Windows,
has added materials like that for its usage (adding a
clip of such materials, to a video composed of more
conventional formats, formats that "run on anything"
being the preference).

If you happen to have a format that is inefficient (like
the GIMP native format is), you can simply apply a
conventional "good" compressor to it and make it
smaller for archival purposes.

Ubuntu-Bios-Boot-Preparation.xcf 5,197,824 bytes <=== Inefficient format
Ubuntu-Bios-Boot-Preparation.xcf.7z 732,988 bytes <=== Compressed is better
Ubuntu-Bios-Boot-Preparation.jpg 1,467,220 bytes <=== Bad choice for a cartoon image
Ubuntu-Bios-Boot-Preparation.gif 508,310 bytes <=== Format selected for "cartoon like" image [Posted]

A vector presentation would be smaller still, but that
is not really practical when the source is screenshots.
Only FRAPS recorded the screen, by recording the graphics
primitives used to make the screen. And that stopped
working on Windows 8 or so.

Paul







--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On Sat, 8/22/2026 5:03 PM, WolfFan wrote:

On Aug 21, 2026, micky wrote
(in article<8a4h8lpu0mu337gqgp90lej8ercgcc4rp6@4ax.com>):

Am I correct with the obvious that the larger the file for a graphic or
photo, the better quality it will have?

Incorrect. There are a multitude of different file formats for images; TIFF files are huge, JPG files are much smaller, GIF files can be smaller than JPGs but have other problems, PNGs are bigger than JPGs but can have better quality.

It's a bit hard to make TIF notepaper for an experiment. I started
with a 1920x1080 white image in GIMP, to be used as feed stock. Then Imagemagick obliged on format conversion.

convert TIFFTEST.tif -compress group4 ccitt4.tif

Next, I pull that back into GIMP. Now, it is treated as "Indexed Color",
but when you Export As and use TIF, the CCITT4 compression option is available at the bottom.

This is monochromatic "Hello World" in 144 point font on a white background
in a 1920x1080 image.

1266 Aug 23 02:36 ccitt4a.tif

JPG doesn't have monochrome so you have to select grayscale.
At 85%, this is the result

23802 Aug 23 02:40 ccitt4a.jpg

Now GIF should do a bangup job, but...

6624 Aug 23 02:45 ccitt4a.gif

So TIF wins this contest.

I used to use the CCITT 4 compressor when making PDF files, as a means
of dropping filesize (technical documents). That was a setting in Distiller.
it had compression options for two image choices.

Using Imagemagick again...

convert ccitt4a.tif ccitt4a.png

3182 Aug 23 02:49 ccitt4a.png

The reason I would try that, is PNG has 1,2,4,8 bit colormaps available.
And Irfanview tells me this is "PNG-ZIP" for compression.

file ccitt4a.png
ccitt4a.png: PNG image data, 1920 x 1080, 1-bit grayscale, non-interlaced

A .webp could be smaller, but I have no idea how to do that :-)
I cannot trust a website converter for the job. Using a hex editor,
there appears to be 4.5KB of image data in the file, plus some
crap that another tool might be able to trim off.

12106 Aug 23 02:59 ccitt4a.webp

file ccitt4a.webp
ccitt4a.webp: RIFF (little-endian) data, Web/P image

Summary: TIF wins this round :-)
As it's a format for bar bets :-)

Paul


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

On 2026/8/23 8:5:8, Paul wrote:
[]

A .webp could be smaller, but I have no idea how to do that :-)

[]
IrfanView (I have 4.75 [with plugins, don't know if those are necessary
for this]) has the ability to save as WEBP; if I select that, it gives
me a choice of lossless compression, or a quality setting of 1-100
default 75, with a choice of 7 compression methods (0-fast, 6-slow) and
1-10 "Analysis pass", with "Additional tuning" of "Filter strength"
0-100 and Sharpness 0-7, both of which are off by default. (No, I don't
know what they all mean either.)

IV has save as options of BMP, ECW, EMF, GIF, ICO, JLS, JP2, JPG, JXL,
PCX, PBM, PDF, PGM, PNG, PPM, QCX, RAW, TGA, TIF, and WEBP - each of
which has different (or maybe no, I'm not going to check all of them!) options.--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()ALIS-Ch++(p)Ar++T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
wrong. - H.L.Mencken

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: Why did smaller picture get bigger size file in one fomat and smaller in another?

J. P. Gilliver <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:

On 2026/8/22 22:3:27, WolfFan wrote:

[...]

A PNG is also compressed, just not as tightly packed as a JPG, and
so would be larger. A TIFF is not compressed at all. TIFFs are huge.

(Note that the 200,000, 600,000, and 800,000 figures
are max, most files won't be that big.)

I _think_ the TIFF format is a wrapper, and _can_ involve some
compression. It's not a common format these days, except from some
scanners; you're unlikely to find it on a web page.

Indeed. AFAIK, TIFF format can be compressed, because my (EPSON)
scanner software has the setting:

Options... -> Compression B&W: -> CCITT Group4

We use that to scan A5-size pages of my wife's handwritten diaries of
out holidays. The (black and white scans) turn out to be about 45KB per
page, so quite small.

N.B. After scanning, I rotate the TIFF files (for some reason the scanner/scanner-software refuses to do that) with IrfanView and
IrfanView has similar compression settings:

Options -> TIFF save options -> Save Compression -> * CCITT Fax 4

So it seems a TIFF file *can* be compressed.

[...]

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)