JPG and PNG are the two most common image formats on the planet, and they’re good at different things. Picking the right one saves you file size or saves you quality, depending on what the image is.

Quick answer: Use JPG for photographs and anything you want small — it compresses photos beautifully. Use PNG for screenshots, logos, text, line art, or anything that needs a transparent background or must stay pixel-perfect. You can convert PNG to JPG or JPG to PNG in your browser.

What is JPG?

JPG (or JPEG) uses lossy compression tuned for photographs. It throws away detail your eye is unlikely to miss, which makes photo files impressively small. The catch: it has no transparency, and every time you edit and re-save a JPG, it compresses again and loses a little more quality.

What is PNG?

PNG uses lossless compression — it preserves every pixel exactly. It also supports transparency (an alpha channel), which is why logos and icons are almost always PNGs. The trade-off is size: a photo saved as PNG can be several times larger than the same photo as a JPG.

When to use each

Reach for JPG when:

  • The image is a photo (people, scenery, anything with smooth color gradients)
  • You want the smallest file for email, upload, or a fast-loading page
  • The image has no transparent areas

Reach for PNG when:

  • You need a transparent background (logos, icons, stickers, overlays)
  • It’s a screenshot, diagram, or contains sharp text/lines (JPG makes those blurry and adds artifacts)
  • You’ll edit and re-save repeatedly and need each save to stay lossless

Why is my PNG screenshot so huge?

Because PNG is lossless, and screenshots of detailed pages carry a lot of data. If you don’t need transparency or perfect sharpness — say you just want to share it — converting to JPG can shrink it dramatically. PNG to JPG does exactly that. Just note that JPG fills any transparent areas with a solid color, since it can’t store transparency.

What about WebP?

WebP is a newer format that’s often smaller than both, with transparency support like PNG. It’s great for websites but not as universally accepted as JPG and PNG for sending files around. If you’re curious, we compared them in WebP vs JPG.

The short version

Photo → JPG. Logo, screenshot, or transparency → PNG. And if you picked wrong, converting between them takes a couple of seconds, right in your browser, with nothing uploaded.