Ooh, totally. Many years ago I was doing some analysis of parking ticket data using gnuplot and had it output a chart png per-street. Not great, but worked well to get to the next step of that project of sorting the directory by file size. The most dynamic streets were the largest files by far.

Another way I've used image compression to identify cops that cover their body cameras while recording -- the filesize to length ratio reflects not much activity going on.