Dropped ICC profiles, not low JPEG quality, cause washed-out thumbnail colors

A developer's experiment using Pillow 11.3 and macOS ICC files found that stripping an image's color profile — not compression quality — is the primary cause of faded-looking thumbnails. When a Display P3 or Adobe RGB profile is dropped during saving, viewers default to sRGB interpretation, causing the most saturated pixels to shift by a perceptible ΔE of up to 7.2. Tools like Pillow silently discard ICC profiles when saving JPEG or WebP files, including after resize operations, while ffmpeg and macOS sips handle profiles more reliably in most formats. The fix involves explicitly passing the ICC profile during the save step in Pillow, or converting the image to sRGB beforehand using ImageCms. Browser testing showed Chromium and WebKit correctly honor embedded profiles, while the Playwright-bundled Firefox 151 rendered tagged and untagged files identically and exported washed-out untagged JPEGs.
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