Compression is a technique that reduces the size of a digital file by eliminating redundant or unnecessary information. Two types of compression are commonly used: lossless and lossy.
Lossless compression is a type of data compression that allows the original data to be reconstructed perfectly from the compressed data. In other words, no data is lost during compression, and the file size is reduced without affecting the quality of the original data. Lossless compression is often used for text, data, and graphics files.
On the other hand, lossy compression is a type of data compression that reduces the size of a file by permanently eliminating some of the data. The amount of data eliminated is based on algorithms that remove the least essential data first. As a result, the quality of the data is affected, and it cannot be reconstructed to the original quality. Lossy compression is often used for multimedia files such as images, audio, and video files, where small losses in quality are acceptable in exchange for smaller file sizes.