All formats
PNG vs JPG
PNG is lossless and supports transparency, which makes it right for screenshots, logos, and anything with sharp edges or flat colour. JPG is lossy and much smaller on photographs. The rule is simple: photographs go to JPG, everything drawn or captured from a screen goes to PNG.
Side by side
| Spec | PNG | JPG |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Image | Image |
| Extensions | .png | .jpg, .jpeg |
| Introduced | 1996 | 1992 |
| Compression | Lossless | Lossy |
| MIME type | image/png | image/jpeg |
| Use it when | Screenshots, logos, icons, images with transparency, or any master file you will edit again. | Sharing photographs where universal compatibility matters more than the last few percent of file size. |
| Avoid it when | Publishing large photographs to the web, where WebP or AVIF will be far smaller at the same quality. | The image has transparency, hard edges, screenshots or text, or will be edited and re-saved repeatedly. |
Where the usual answer breaks
A photograph that will be edited and re-saved repeatedly belongs in PNG, because each JPG save discards more detail.
PNG
- Lossless, so quality never degrades across saves
- Full 8-bit alpha transparency
- Excellent for text, screenshots, logos and flat colour
- Much larger than JPG or WebP for photographs
- No native animation support in practice (APNG is a separate extension)
JPG
- Opens everywhere, with no compatibility caveats
- Small files for photographic content
- Adjustable quality, so you control the size/fidelity trade-off
- No transparency (alpha) channel
- Every re-save loses more detail, so repeated edits degrade the image
- Visible blocking and halos on sharp edges, text and flat colour
Convert between PNG and JPG
JPG to PNG
This cannot recover detail. JPG has already discarded it, so the PNG is a lossless copy of a lossy image and will usually be several times larger than the original file.
PNG to JPG
PNG transparency has nowhere to go in a JPG, so Filoven composites the image onto a white background before encoding rather than producing black fringes.
Other comparisons
Last updated 2026-08-03