One of my hobbies used to be to download very nice pictures and save them as JPEGs in the lowest possible quality. Here are my favorites. IIRC, resizing the window can actually change the picture, or at least it did on Tumblr.
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I thought this was going to be about JPGs that have been saved and resaved.
I was just recently trying something similar with some photos, but I was reducing the color depth rather than applying high compression levels. Inspired by this thread, I tried that on a few just now but neither the forum software nor my Web browser will display them. They are considered corrupted. Is there a trick to it, other than converting to another format?
Here are a few of my own photos given this treatment. (I saved them at high compression, resized them, and then saved them as PNGs as a workaround.)
I like how this one totally lost its color.
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These are great, I especially like the rainbow beach.
I just open them in paint.net and save as the lowest possible quality jpg. Here’s one new for 2016:
I want to make an adventure game using these, some sort of faux old computer aesthetic.
EDIT: Oh, you’re asking about reducing the color depth, not upping the compression. That, I don’t know! 
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I think it’s also sort of neat to lower color depth and then hand tweak the palette:
I thought I was kind of weird for sitting in front of gimp for hours grossing up pics.
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Oh that’s neat! Somehow it reminds me of an old Polaroid photo that’s faded, except on acid. Super cool, I’ll have to mess with that.
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@VastleCania what’s yr tumblr? i wanna reblog you
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http://clintmakesa.tumblr.com/
I just re-posted them because it was 3 years ago, haha. There’s a bunch of stuff I’d completely forgotten I’d written, including a metroid fan fic that I scrolled past very quickly.
A couple more. For some reason, it let me upload the JPGs this time.
I tried doing this to a few video game screenshots but they just looked bad, not especially interesting.
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I really like the reducing the color depth with a custom palette. I applied it to my favorite subject, Aurora Borealises, and got these two nice ones
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Another fun trick is decomposing channels into layers and then recomposing after editing. JPG compression uses chroma subsampling which reduces the resolution of the color data without affecting the intensity-- you can hand tweak the compression effect/artifacts this way without relying on just a compression slider. Also works on other channel separations like rgb with different results.
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it’s like a polaroid from another dimension
I thought nothing could make The Sims more terrifying
Mods please change my custom title to “extradimensional polaroid”
hashtag blessed edit: thank you based mods
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I layered the original image on top and gave it about a 50% transparency, and I like how it turned out a lot. Want to experiment with this more in the future.
