# JPEG Artifact Generator

> A free, in-browser tool that adds adjustable JPEG compression artifacts, chromatic aberration, noise, and generational loss to any image. Runs entirely client-side — images never leave the user's device.

## What it does

The tool intentionally degrades images using JPEG compression to produce the "deep-fried" look common in internet memes. It exposes four controls:

- **JPEG quality** (1–100): lower values introduce more visible compression artifacts (8×8 blocking, ringing, color smearing)
- **Color shift**: chromatic aberration intensity, simulating cheap-lens RGB channel drift
- **Noise**: grain added on top of compression artifacts
- **Generations**: how many times to re-encode the image, simulating cumulative damage from repeated saves

Four named presets bundle common combinations: Subtle, Crunchy, Deep-fried, and Generational loss.

## Key facts

- All image processing happens in the browser via the [imagerot](https://www.npmjs.com/package/imagerot) library
- No images are uploaded to a server; no analytics tracks uploaded content
- Supports JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF input; output is always JPEG
- Supports bulk processing: drop many images, apply settings to all, download individually or all at once
- By default, output is scaled to 1280px on the longest edge so JPEG artifacts are visually proportional; a toggle disables this

## Why someone would use it

- **Memes**: deep-fried images are a long-running internet aesthetic
- **Privacy**: re-encoding strips EXIF metadata (camera model, GPS location, timestamps) and makes reverse-image search significantly harder
- **Aesthetic**: vaporwave, lo-fi, glitch art, and retro internet nostalgia all lean on the crunchy JPEG look

## URLs

- [Homepage and tool](https://jpegartifactgenerator.com/): the entire app, single page

## Author

Built by [Andy Feliciotti](https://drawne.com).