A slight impairment of the image quality is inevitable. This format is one of the most popular these days. It reduces the file size appreciably without impairing the image quality to any great extent. This means less waiting when downloading. Saving in the .JPG format you can choose between many degrees of compression.
High compression produces smaller files, but also a drop in image quality.
Because image quality is of the highest importance for this project we have chosen a low degree of compression. This means a lot when browsing as 20 thumbnails have to be downloaded on every page. The original .TIF files are saved uncompressed on CD-ROM disks. This makes it possible to make new and larger pictures to display on the WWW when in a few years the average screen has a higher resolution than today. A CD-ROM contains between 30 and 40 files.