The JPEG format has dominated digital image sharing on the internet for over thirty years due to its effective lossy compression and standardized development by a committee, differentiating it from the GIF format. Its ability to degrade gracefully while retaining image quality has made it essential for various applications, despite the emergence of other formats like PNG. The article also discusses the technical aspects of JPEG compression, particularly the discrete cosine transform (DCT), which allows for efficient image size reduction.