JPG vs PNG vs WebP: Which Image Format Should You Use?

The three formats at a glance

Lossy vs lossless — the difference that matters

Lossy compression throws away detail your eye is unlikely to notice — subtle variations in color and texture — to make the file much smaller. Lossless compression shrinks the file without discarding anything, so the decompressed image is pixel-for-pixel identical to the original.

Photos are full of noise and gradual color changes, which lossy compression handles brilliantly: a JPG of a photo can be a fraction of the size of the same image saved as PNG and look the same. But lossy compression struggles with hard edges. Around text, icons and thin lines it leaves faint smudges and “halos” known as compression artefacts. That’s why a screenshot saved as JPG often looks slightly fuzzy, while the PNG version stays crisp.

When to use JPG

JPG has been the default format for photographs since the early 1990s, and almost every device, app and website understands it. Choose JPG when:

• You’re sharing or uploading photos and don’t know what the other side supports — job portals, government forms, print shops, email.
• The image is a photograph or a realistic scene without transparent areas.
• You want to control the trade-off between size and quality. A quality setting around 70–85% is a good balance for most photos.

Avoid JPG for images you’ll edit and re-save many times: each save compresses again and quality slowly degrades.

When to use PNG

PNG is lossless and supports full transparency, which makes it the right tool for:

• Screenshots of apps, documents and websites, where text needs to stay sharp.
• Logos, icons and diagrams with flat colors and hard edges.
• Images with a transparent background, such as a product cut-out or a signature you’ll place on a document.
• Master copies you plan to keep editing.

The downside is size. A 12-megapixel photo saved as PNG can be 15–25 MB, several times the size of a good JPG. If someone sends you a huge PNG photo, converting it to JPG or WebP is usually the right move.

When to use WebP

WebP was developed by Google specifically for the web. It can work lossy (like JPG) or lossless (like PNG), supports transparency and animation, and generally produces smaller files than either: Google’s own comparisons found lossy WebP files around 25–34% smaller than JPGs of similar quality, and lossless WebP around 26% smaller than PNG.

Every modern browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari (since version 14) — displays WebP, so for images on your own website it’s an easy win. Where WebP still trips people up is outside the browser: some older photo editors, office software, print services and upload forms reject it. If someone can’t open your WebP, convert it to JPG or PNG.

Quick decision guide

How to convert between formats

1. Open the Image Converter and add your image. It runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.
2. Choose JPG, PNG or WebP as the output format.
3. For JPG and WebP, set the quality. Start around 80% and lower it if you need a smaller file.
4. Convert and download. Compare the file size and zoom in to check quality.

To make an image smaller without changing its format, use the Image Compressor. If the image is simply larger than it needs to be — a 4000-pixel photo shown at 800 pixels wide — reducing the dimensions with the Image Resizer saves far more space than any format change.