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I think the photos look like that to achieve a very small file size. The whole site is hosted and a small solar and battery powered server, so every MB matters.

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For photographic images, dithered PNGs have worse quality:size ratio than JPEGs. If you want small files and are willing to sacrifice quality you can turn the JPEG compression up or reduce the resolution.

Yeah, looks like you are correct. It seems it was maybe as much about style/design as it was compression:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar...

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ (Lots of comments at the bottom about image compression)

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