[RESOLVED] How to read JPG quality from saved image?

[mlowery]

I've inherited the family digital photo album of JPG photos. There are tons of dupes saved at varying sizes and JPG compressions. I'd like to write a quick script to group the images by size and JPG quality so I can review and purge them more easily.

I can get the dimensions of an image through the GDI+ UDF. How can I read the JPG compression / quality from the saved image? (EXIF data is no help; whatever editing tool was used to resize the files wiped it out.)

Edited August 2, 2008 by mlowery

[weaponx]

This could be tricky, it doesn't look like GDI+ offers full functionality for your needs:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/p...ost23355421.asp

[mlowery]

This could be tricky, it doesn't look like GDI+ offers full functionality for your needs:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/p...ost23355421.asp

That's what I noticed also. I'm hoping there is a DLL or other tool I can use (ImageMagick?) to find that data. The thread you linked mentions an Intel DLL, which I might be able to track down, but I'm not sure how to find documentation for the DLL calls if I do find it.

EDIT: From reading the Wikipedia entry on JPEG, it looks like I may be able to infer a quality level by comparing the filesize with image dimensions, as higher quality will require more bits per pixel. That rough comparison will probably fail for a "noisy" image that doesn't compress well, though.

I'll try some tests with that approach, but would love to have a "proper" solution if one exists.

[Richard Robertson]

It may be possible that there isn't actually a "quality" value stored anywhere in the file. I think it may just be part of the compression algorithm. Just something to think about.

[mlowery]

^^^ This turns out to be correct.

Quality values are totally arbitrary and represented differently by different programs. Any quality value being displayed for an already-created file is just being inferred unless the app stores it in a tag.

So, I'll just do some basic bits per pixel math and use that as a rough guide. Not perfect, but beats having nothing to go by!