JPG vs. PNG vs. WebP: which one should you actually use?

Most people never choose an image format on purpose — it's whatever the camera, screenshot tool, or export dialog defaulted to. That's fine most of the time, but the three common web formats are built for different jobs, and picking the wrong one costs you either file size or quality for no reason.

JPG (JPEG) is built for photos: continuous tones, lots of color variation, no sharp edges or flat color areas. It compresses photographic detail well because the human eye doesn't notice the small losses it introduces. It does not support transparency, and it handles flat-color graphics — logos, screenshots with text, icons — badly, producing visible blotchy artifacts around sharp edges that a photo wouldn't show.

PNG is the opposite case: lossless, so every pixel is preserved exactly, and it supports transparency. That makes it the right choice for screenshots, logos, diagrams, and anything with sharp edges or text baked into the image. The trade-off is size — a PNG of a real photo is often 3-5x larger than an equivalent JPG, for a difference most people can't see.

WebP is newer and, for most practical purposes, strictly better than both when your audience's browser supports it (every major browser has for years): it does lossy compression like JPG at meaningfully smaller file sizes for equivalent quality, and it also supports transparency like PNG. The one reason to still avoid it is compatibility with older software that expects JPG or PNG specifically — some email clients, some older image editors, some print workflows.

A simple rule that covers most cases: photos going on a website, use WebP if you can, JPG if you need maximum compatibility. Anything with transparency, sharp edges, or text — screenshots, logos, diagrams — use PNG, or WebP if file size matters and you don't need it to open in older software. Our Convert Image tool switches between all three locally, so it's a reasonable way to test which one actually looks right for a specific image before committing to it.