Guide
JPG, PNG or WebP: which should you use?
Most format advice is a table of technical properties that leaves you no better able to choose. The decision is actually simple, because these formats are not competing at the same thing: one is built for photographs, one for graphics, and one is a newer attempt at both.
Short answer
Photographs: JPG, or WebP if everything downstream accepts it. Screenshots, diagrams, text, flat colour or transparency: PNG, or WebP. When in doubt and it is going on a website, WebP. When in doubt and it is going into a form, JPG.
What each one is for
JPG is lossy and built for photographs. It discards the detail your eye is worst at noticing - fine colour variation rather than brightness edges - which is why it handles a sky beautifully and a screenshot badly. No transparency.
PNG is lossless and built for graphics. Every pixel is stored exactly, which is right for text, sharp lines and flat colour, and wasteful for a photograph. Supports transparency.
WebP does both, with a lossy mode that typically beats JPEG by 25-35% at matched visual quality and a lossless mode that usually beats PNG. Supports transparency. Every current browser reads it.
The decision
In practice you are answering two questions: is it a photograph, and does it have to survive somewhere you do not control?
- Photograph, for the web - WebP.
- Photograph, for a form or an unknown destination - JPG. It is the format everything accepts.
- Screenshot, diagram, logo, anything with text - PNG, or WebP lossless where you control what reads it.
- Needs transparency - PNG or WebP. Not JPG, which has none and fills it white.
- Going to a printer - ask them. Print workflows often want TIFF or a particular colour profile, which is a different conversation.
Where the obvious answer is wrong
A PNG holding a photograph. Very common, usually because a design tool exported it that way. It can be ten times the size of the same picture as a JPG with no visible difference.
A JPG of a screenshot. Also common, and it looks bad - text edges are exactly what JPG handles worst. Keep PNG and reduce the colour count instead.
AVIF. Smaller again than all of them, and worth knowing that far more browsers display it than can create it: only Chromium-based browsers write AVIF, while Firefox and Safari read it and cannot encode it. The conversion pages here check before offering the format rather than handing you a file named .avif that is really a PNG.
HEIC. What an iPhone saves by default, and what most browsers other than Safari cannot decode at all - a licensing consequence rather than an oversight. Setting Settings, Camera, Formats to Most Compatible avoids it for new photographs.
Frequently asked questions
- Which format should I pick when I do not know where the image will end up?
- JPG for a photograph and PNG for anything with text or transparency. Both are accepted essentially everywhere, which is the property that matters when the destination is unknown. Reach for WebP once you do know, and know it is welcome there.
- Does converting PNG to JPG lose quality?
- Yes, and whether it matters depends entirely on the content. A photograph usually converts with no visible loss at a sensible quality setting. A screenshot gets visibly worse around text, which is exactly where you were looking. Transparency is lost either way and becomes white.
- Can I convert back to the original format?
- You can convert back, but you cannot recover what was discarded. PNG to JPG and back gives you a PNG containing JPG's artefacts at PNG's file size - the worst of both. Keep the original.
Last checked 2026-09. File sizes and platform limits change; where this guide states one, it is what we could verify at that date.