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

Most people pick an image format by accident. The camera saved a JPG, the screenshot tool saved a PNG, and that is what gets used. Choosing deliberately takes about ten seconds and routinely cuts file sizes by half or more.

Here is the short version, followed by the reasoning.

The one-line answer

JPG: the universal one

JPG has been around since 1992 and opens on literally everything — every phone, every printer, every ancient office computer. It is lossy, meaning it achieves small files by permanently discarding detail your eye is unlikely to notice.

Where it shines: photographs. Skies, skin, landscapes — anything with smooth gradual changes in colour. A 12-megapixel photo that would be 30 MB uncompressed becomes 2 MB as a JPG with no visible difference.

Where it fails: anything with hard edges. Save a screenshot of text as a JPG and you will see fuzzy grey smudging around every letter. JPG also has no transparency channel, so a logo with a transparent background comes out sitting on a solid rectangle.

The trap: every time you re-save a JPG it loses a little more. Edit, save, edit, save, and after several rounds you can see it. Always work from the original.

PNG: the faithful one

PNG is lossless. Every pixel comes back exactly as it went in, and it supports full transparency including soft edges and drop shadows.

Where it shines: screenshots, logos, icons, diagrams, charts, pixel art — anything with flat colour areas, sharp lines or text. It also handles transparency properly, which JPG simply cannot do.

Where it fails: photographs. Because PNG never discards anything, a photo saved as PNG can easily be five to ten times larger than the same photo as a JPG, for a difference nobody can see. Putting PNG photos on a website is one of the most common causes of a slow page.

A myth worth killing: converting a JPG to PNG does not restore quality. The detail JPG discarded is gone. All you get is a much larger file containing the same damaged image. PNG stops further loss; it cannot reverse past loss.

WebP: the modern one

WebP arrived in 2010 and is now supported by every browser in current use — Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. It does both jobs: lossy compression like JPG, lossless and transparent like PNG.

Where it shines: the web, without qualification. Typical savings against an equivalent-quality JPG run 25 to 35 per cent, and against PNG often 60 per cent or more. Same picture, half the download.

Where it fails: outside a browser. Print shops, older desktop software and some email clients still handle it poorly. It is a web format and should be treated as one — keep a PNG or TIFF master for anything headed to paper.

What the numbers look like in practice

A 3000 × 2000 photograph, straight from a phone camera:

• PNG — around 8 MB
• JPG at 90% quality — around 1.8 MB
• WebP at 82% quality — around 900 KB

All three look identical on screen. The PNG is nearly nine times heavier than the WebP for exactly no visible benefit.

Now a 1400 × 900 screenshot of a settings page:

• PNG — around 180 KB, text perfectly crisp
• JPG at 90% — around 220 KB, and visibly fuzzy around the letters

Here PNG is both smaller and better. This is the reversal that surprises people: the right format depends entirely on what is in the image, not on which format is generally “better”.

Where does AVIF fit?

AVIF is newer again and compresses even harder than WebP — often another 20 per cent. Browser support is now broad, but encoding is slower and tooling is thinner. WebP remains the pragmatic default in 2026; AVIF is worth adopting when you are optimising a large image-heavy site and can automate the conversion.

A decision you can make in five seconds

Ask yourself one question: does this image have sharp edges, flat colour, text or transparency?

• Yes → PNG (or WebP if it is going on a website)
• No, it is a photograph → WebP for the web, JPG for everything else

That single question gets it right almost every time.

Convert without installing anything

You can move between all three formats here, in your browser, with no upload and no account:

• Convert to WebP — halve your website’s image weight
• Convert to PNG — lossless, transparency preserved
• Convert to JPG — universal compatibility
• Compress an image — quality and width in one pass

All of them are free for life, with no sign-up and no daily limit. Your images are processed on your own device and never uploaded anywhere, which is also why there is no cap on how many you can run.