tl;dr:“This post is me indulging in a rabbit hole. I somehow found myself thinking about images, probably after my recent exploration of some compression schemes. It’s common knowledge that images are either grayscale or RGB, that mixing red, green, and blue creates new colors. But there’s certainly more to storing an image than just aligning three-byte RGB values. Something about that idea piqued my curiosity, so this blog post is my attempt to scratch that itch and answer the question: how are images really stored?”
tl;dr:“What is compression? We represent data using bytes (1 byte = 8 bits). The more bits we have, the more storage space we need and the longer the transmission time. If we can represent some data with fewer bits, we can save on both storage and time it takes to process or transmit. So compression translates to cost savings and better performance. And at scale, we are talking about millions of $.”