Edit JPEG photos without recompression

Better JPEG edits your JPEG image files, offering the basic tools like crop, red eye or resize. The interface, with the left side explorer panel to search for your pictures and the top tool bar, makes everything easy to access. You can quickly add text comments to your jpegs. Better JPEG claims that all operations are lossless, meaning the quality of the image will stay the same no matter how much editing you do.

We were disappointed by the limited editing features. No contrast, sepia or greyscale features even those are often considered basic. You can send a jpeg via email but for that, you will have to make sure you have a MAPI email client. The application also crashed when we were browsing for pictures.

As the developer states in his description, JPEG is really only useful to quickly edit JPEG images. However, with most photo organisers, like Picasa, already offering more simple editing tools, Better JPEG turns out to be something of a lame duck.

The JPEG image format is inherently lossy. Because of this, each edit and subsequent recompression of JPEG images in general purpose image editors, such as Adobe Photoshop, results in a progressive degradation of image quality.

Fortunately there is, in most cases, a way to avoid this unnecessary recompression. If you just need to quickly process a group of JPEG photos from your latest vacation – rotate, crop, remove red-eye, imprint date or comments – you do not need to compromise on image quality. Better JPEG is a batch JPEG editor that can do all of this without unnecessary loss of image quality.