Which JPG has better quality? And which Exif Byte Order is better?

Question

I have two folders of "the same" JPG images that I made over 10 years ago, when I was a kid, but the size of photos in one folder is different than the other.

The photos were made on my old Samsung Omnia smartphone and probably one folder was imported using "drag and drop" and the other using Samsung's software.

I want to delete one of these folders, but don't know which one to keep.

I have analysed images from both folders using the website which analyses and displays the meta­data in images and other media files, this one: https://exifinfo.org

There are a lot of differences, including different Exif Byte Order: Little-endian (Intel, II) vs Big-endian (Motorola, MM). Although I don't know what this means and which one is better.

I want to keep the folder of images with better quality or better metadata, but I don't know, which one it is.

Here are sample images from each folder:

Image from first folder 1 137 367 bytes - https://drive.proton.me/urls/R06MXT0BZ4#Ny8viBCrhdSu

Image from second folder - 1 128 227 bytes - https://drive.proton.me/urls/V7TQ44QE48#KuvZv8M4Giew

Please help me to understand which folder contains images with better quality. Thank you!

Answer 1

I don't think there's any perceivable difference.

Visually they seem identical, even at extreme zoom. There are some minor & unimportant differences in the metadata.

The dotted line here is where the join is between the two images…

^{Click for full size}

Answer 2

Using ImageMagick you can compare the image data (see ImageMagick Image Similarity Comparison). Using a command such as

magick compare Image1.jpg Image2.jpg Difference.png

will produce a PNG file where the whitish pixels are where the image data is the same and the redish pixels are where there are differences.

Here's the result with your image. The image data between the two is identical.

You should take note that this doesn't take into account color space data and ICC_Profiles. A file with an ICC_Profile may have the same exact image data as another, but the actual displayed colors may be different.