I'm writing this as a venue towards improved photographs, preferrably those without compression artifacts.

There are ways to compress images such that, when recreated, there is no loss, and no artifacts. While few well for graphics images, there are three that really stand out:

According to these tests, PAQ8P and STUFFIT 12.0b both enjoy a respectable 25% compression ratio, and PackJPG2.3 is close behind, at 25%.

By comparison, the next leading contender pulls in at a horrible 3.55% - might as well save the processing cycles and call it a day.

But that's compressing a JPG/JPEG image, which itself, has already been lossy compressed (resulting in a loss of data).

How are the various programs at compressing a BMP (bitmap) image?

Again, PAQ8P takes the lead at 87%, followed by STUFFIT 12.0 only half a percent behind. Surprisingly, however, about half of all programs are within 10% of that figure, and more than 4/5's are within 20% of that figure.

So what's the solution? How do we eliminate the scourage of compression artifacts? Simple - have all cameras, handheld, profession, space-born, whatever, take images and temporarily store them in bitmap format (lossless), while performing ongoing background compression (time isn't critical) to achieve a better than 7 to 1 compression for long-term storage and transmittal.

Then, use that amazing processing power of computers (workstations/desktops) everywhere, to perform on-the-fly decompression for viewing, and re-compressing for subsequent storage after image manipulation (such as cropping or adjustment of colors).

I just used PAQ8p to compress my avatar, which is already compressed as it's a gif file:

Initial size: 1,877 bytes
PAQ'd size: 35 bytes

Compression ratio: 98.135%

Then I tried it on a jpg, my Halloween avatar, which exists on my computer as a 12,458 byte jpg.

PAQ'd size: 30 bytes.
Compression ratio: 99.759%

That's lossless, folks: 0% loss.

No artifacts.