jpegs lose quality?

[JohnMF]

Do .jpg images lose quality with age?

Its just that i opened a couple of old (about 2 years) .jpg photos i had on my hard drive and noticed that the picture quality wasnt as good as i remember it being. There was artifacts and noise on them.

Im i going mad or do they degrade with age?

 

[Dweller]

no file format degrades with age but JPEG is a "lossy" format to everytime you "save as" .jpg you are losing more data as it compresses the file.

I suspect that you have developed a better eye over the last 2 years for the kinds of artifacts that jpeg compression leaves behind.