Find the JPEGs Before your next Big Campaign: A Delivery-Report Hack for Sharper Dynamic Media Images

I’m part of the AEM Dynamic Media team. In earlier posts, I showed how the Dynamic Media delivery report reveals what your assets do after they leave the DAM: which assets are delivered most, and which channels and markets drive that traffic. I also shared three best practices for sharper, smaller, smarter images: start with high-quality sources, apply the right presets, and let Dynamic Media Smart Imaging optimize delivery for every device.

This post connects the two. While reviewing Dynamic Media usage with customers, we often notice that a meaningful share of delivered images starts from JPEG sources. Many of these were high-traffic product images, the ones shoppers see most.

JPEG is a lossy format. To keep files small, it throws away fine detail and color information the eye is less likely to notice. The cost shows up as blocky artifacts, banding in smooth gradients such as skies or skin tones, and fuzzy halos around sharp edges and text. It gets worse each time a JPEG is edited and re-saved/resizing. That’s why Adobe’s best practice is to start with lossless sources such as TIFF, PNG or PSD. No amount of sharpening downstream can restore detail the source never had.

Here’s a simple, spreadsheet-only hack to find those JPEGs and fix them before your next big campaign.

Meet Luma

Luma, our fictional retailer, has 2 million assets in Dynamic Media and serves about 1 billion image deliveries every month. 65% of that traffic comes from mobile and tablet. Luma is refreshing its website for the Spring sale and wants every product image to look its best.

The problem is that Luma’s merchandising team has uploaded JPEGs for years. Luma can’t re-shoot 2 million assets in few weeks. They don’t need to, though. They only need to find the JPEGs that matter most.

The Hack: The Dynamic Media Delivery report and Simple Excel Work

1. Download the Dynamic Media Delivery report. In AEM as a Cloud Service, generate the self-service Dynamic Media delivery report for last month. It lists Name, Path, Dynamic Media ID, Referrer and delivery hits for your most-delivered assets.

2. Filter for JPEGs. Open the CSV in Excel and apply a Text Filter on column “Name”: Ends with .jpg OR Ends with .jpeg.

3. Sort by Hits, largest to smallest. Your top rows are now your quality review list.

Optional refinements:

• Filter Referrer to focus on the storefront of choice. If you have good coverage of referrer data, it helps with this discovery.
• Use Path to prioritize categories where quality shows most, such as /IMAGES/APPAREL/ or zoom-enabled PDP imagery.

Luma’s illustrative result:

In about ten minutes, Luma has turned “2 million assets” into “the top 200 JPEGs that drive most of our JPEG traffic.” That’s a list a team can work through before the next Spring campaign.

Then Follow the Three-Step Playbook

Source Right

For each asset on the list, ask the creative or photography team for the original TIFF, PNG or PSD. Replace the JPEG master only where the improvement is visible. Make sure the dimensions match the largest size the image will be displayed at, such as the PDP zoom viewer. Then fix the problem upstream: update your creative brief and agency guidelines so new deliverables arrive as high-resolution, lossless files at maximum size. That way, next season’s images start right and don’t end up on your JPEG list.

Process for Quality

Use image presets for each placement (thumbnail, PLP, PDP) and bundle the right size and sharpening modifiers (op_usm, op_sharpen, resmode) inside them.

A great source with no preset applied may still look soft as the asset is resized.

Deliver Smart

Let Dynamic Media Smart Imaging handle delivery optimization. With 65% of Luma’s traffic on mobile and tablet, device- and browser-aware delivery of AVIF or WebP matters a lot. Avoid hard-coding fmt=webp in URLs. On its own, it doesn’t invoke Smart Imaging’s automatic format negotiation. Enable Smart Imaging at the domain level for consistency and scale. This blog demonstrates how Dynamic Media ingests a 26 MB full size high res TIFF and delivers a 36 KB AVIF without compromising quality.

Final Thoughts

Your delivery report already knows which images your customers see most. With three Excel filters, it also tells you which of them started life as a JPEG. Fix the source for those images, apply the right presets, and let Smart Imaging do the rest. Your shoppers get sharper images, and your pages stay light.