I have carried this idea around for years.
That JPEG images slowly degrade just by existing.
That if you save a photo, leave it untouched long enough and come back years later, it will somehow be worse.
Turns out that is not how it works.
Short answer
JPEG files do not age, rot or lose quality over time.
A JPEG saved in 1998 and stored safely will be bit for bit identical today.
If something changes, it is not time doing the damage.
What JPEGs do not do
They do not slowly deteriorate.
They do not lose quality just by sitting on disk.
They do not fade like VHS tapes or printed photos.
They do not change if left completely untouched.
Digital files are static.
Either the bits are intact.
Or they are corrupted.
There is no in between.
Where the confusion comes from
Repeated re saving
This is the real culprit.
JPEG is a lossy compression format.
Every time you open a JPEG, edit it and save it again as JPEG, compression is applied again.
More information is discarded.
Do this enough times and the degradation becomes visible.
This is often remembered as JPEGs aging.
What is actually happening is human workflows causing loss.
Not time.
Storage corruption
All digital files can suffer from hardware failure.
JPEG, PNG, PDF and ZIP are not special here.
Drives fail.
Memory degrades.
Controllers misbehave.
Bits flip.
When this happens, it is not gradual.
It is not aesthetic.
The file usually becomes partially unreadable or broken.
And it is not JPEG specific.
Platform re exports
Social media platforms, messengers and CMSs often recompress images.
They downscale resolution.
They strip metadata.
Each upload, download and re upload cycle introduces new compression artifacts.
This reinforces the idea that the image is getting worse over time.
Again, it is workflow.
Not age.
The important distinction
| Concept | Real | Time based |
|---|---|---|
| JPEG aging | No | No |
| Repeated recompression | Yes | No |
| Storage corruption | Yes | Rare |
| Physical photo decay | Yes | Yes |
Best practices
If you want zero degradation, keep an original master.
RAW, TIFF or PNG.
Never overwrite it.
Export JPEGs only as derivatives.
If you must edit JPEGs, edit and save once.
Avoid multiple save cycles.
Use the highest quality setting.
For long term archives, redundancy matters.
Backups help.
Checksums help.
Time alone does not hurt files.
Why this myth stuck around
In the late nineties and early two thousands, JPEGs were edited repeatedly.
Storage was unreliable.
Originals were often lost.
People compared old JPEGs to a memory of what they once were.
And blamed time.
Bottom line
JPEGs do not age.
People re saving them do.
So then I just remembered it wrong.
[ N ]