In information technology, lossy compression (irreversible compression) is the class of data encoding methods that uses inexact approximations (or partial data discarding) to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storage, handling, and transmitting content. Different versions of the photo of the cat at the right show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression (reversible data compression) which does not degrade the image. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is often much higher than through lossless techniques.