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

All three formats store the same basic thing — pixels — but they compress and support features very differently, and picking the wrong one is a common, invisible source of either a bloated page or a blurry image.

JPG: best for photos

JPG uses lossy compression tuned for photographic detail — smooth colour gradients, complex textures — and produces small file sizes at that. It doesn't support transparency, and it handles sharp edges and flat colour (like text or line art) poorly, often producing visible fuzzy artefacts around hard edges.

PNG: best for graphics, screenshots, and anything needing transparency

PNG uses lossless compression — no detail is discarded, so text, logos, and flat-colour graphics stay perfectly sharp. It also supports true transparency (an alpha channel), which JPG cannot do at all. The trade-off is file size: a PNG of a detailed photo is typically far larger than the same image saved as JPG, since lossless compression can't shrink photographic noise as aggressively.

WebP: the modern middle ground

WebP supports both lossy and lossless modes in one format, plus transparency — and at equivalent visual quality, it typically produces meaningfully smaller files than JPG (for photos) or PNG (for graphics). Browser support is now near-universal, which is why it's become the default recommendation for web images where page load speed matters.

Quick decision guide

• Photo for a webpage, file size matters → WebP, or JPG as a fallback
• Logo, icon, or screenshot with text → PNG (or lossless WebP)
• Image needs a transparent background → PNG or WebP, never JPG
• Sending a photo by email, universal compatibility matters more than size → JPG

One thing that doesn't help

Converting a JPG to PNG after the fact doesn't recover any lost detail — the compression artefacts are already baked into the pixels. The format only affects quality at the point the image is first saved or re-encoded.

Our Image Tools page converts between JPG, PNG, and WebP (plus resize, crop, and compress) in one place. Converting from a phone's HEIC photos first? The HEIC to JPG/PNG Converter handles that conversion specifically.