What is a progressive JPEG?

A simple or “baseline” JPEG file is stored as one top-to-bottom scan of the image. Progressive JPEG divides the file into a series of scans. The first scan shows the image at the equivalent of a very low quality setting, and therefore it takes very little space. Following scans gradually improve the quality. Each scan adds to the data already provided, so that the total storage requirement is roughly the same as for a baseline JPEG image of the same quality as the final scan (Basically, progressive JPEG is just a rearrangement of the same data into a more complicated order).