JPG vs PNG vs WebP: Which Image Format to Use and When

Use JPG for photos you share, print or upload to forms. Use PNG for screenshots, logos, text and anything that needs a transparent background or pixel-perfect edges. Use WebP for images on your own website, where its smaller file sizes speed up pages. If a site will not accept your file, convert it, for example with WebP to JPG or PNG to JPG.

Quick comparison

JPG: the default for photos

JPG uses lossy compression. It throws away detail your eyes are unlikely to notice, mostly fine colour variations, and lets you choose how much to throw away with a quality setting. At quality around 75–85, a photo looks essentially the same as the original but is many times smaller.

The trade-offs:

• Sharp edges and text get fuzzy halos (artefacts), especially at low quality.
• Re-saving repeatedly loses a little more each time. Edit from the original when you can.
• No transparency.

Pick JPG for camera photos, exam and job application photos, and anything you will email or print. If a JPG is too large, compress JPEG reduces it without changing the format.

PNG: exact pixels, bigger files

PNG is lossless: what you save is exactly what you get back. It compresses areas of flat colour very well, which is why screenshots and logos are small as PNGs, but it handles the noise and gradients of a photo poorly. A phone photo saved as PNG can be five to ten times the size of the JPG.

Pick PNG for:

• Screenshots, especially with text or code.
• Logos, icons, diagrams and line art.
• Images with transparency, like a signature on a clear background or a product cut-out.
• Master copies you will edit again.

If you have a photo saved as PNG by mistake, converting with PNG to JPG usually shrinks it dramatically. To shrink a PNG while keeping it a PNG, use compress PNG.

WebP: built for the web

WebP was developed by Google for web pages. It supports both lossy and lossless modes, transparency and animation, and its lossy mode generally produces smaller files than JPG at similar visual quality. Lossless WebP is also typically smaller than PNG. All major current browsers display WebP.

Pick WebP for:

• Images on your own website or blog, where smaller files mean faster loading.
• Transparent web graphics that would be heavy as PNG.

Avoid WebP for:

• Form uploads. Most exam, job and government portals list only JPG/JPEG (and sometimes PNG).
• Sending to people on older software, or for printing services.

You can convert in both directions: JPG to WebP or PNG to WebP when preparing site images, and WebP to JPG or WebP to PNG when you saved an image from a website and need a more compatible file.

What about HEIC and AVIF?

HEIC is the iPhone camera's default. It is efficient but poorly supported outside Apple devices; convert it with HEIC to JPG when needed. AVIF is a newer web format that can compress even more than WebP and is supported in current major browsers, but tool and upload support is still patchier, so WebP remains the easier choice for most sites.

Choosing by situation

Lossy vs lossless, in plain terms

Lossless (PNG, lossless WebP) is like zipping a file: the image is packed more tightly, and unpacking gives back the exact original. It works brilliantly on images with large areas of identical colour, and poorly on photos, where almost every pixel is slightly different.

Lossy (JPG, lossy WebP) is more like summarising: the encoder keeps what matters to the eye and discards fine detail. You choose the trade-off with a quality setting. Between roughly 70 and 85, most people cannot tell the difference from the original on a screen; below about 50, blockiness and colour smears start to show.

That is why the same image can be 2 MB as a PNG and 200 KB as a JPG with no visible change, while a screenshot of text might be smaller and much crisper as a PNG than as a JPG.

For website owners

If you run a site, a sensible default is to serve photos and illustrations as WebP, keep logos as SVG or PNG, and size images to the width they actually display at. Resizing a 4000 px wide photo down to 1200 px usually saves more than any format change. Keep your original JPGs or PNGs as masters, and generate WebP copies from them.

Common mistakes

• Saving photos as PNG, then struggling with huge files.
• Saving screenshots or text images as low-quality JPG, making text blurry.
• Renaming a file's extension (for example .webp to .jpg) instead of converting. The file is still WebP inside and many apps will reject it.
• Converting JPG to PNG to "improve" quality. It only makes the file bigger; detail lost to JPG compression does not come back.
• Re-compressing the same JPG many times. Keep an original and compress copies from it.

The format choice is mostly about where the image is going. Match the format to the destination, and convert when you need to. Our converters run in the browser, so this takes a few seconds without uploading anything.

Questions