If the image is a photograph and it is going on a web page, in an email or into a listing, save it as a JPEG. If it has transparency, hard edges, text, flat blocks of colour or a user interface in it, save it as a PNG. That single rule settles most of the decisions you will make this week.
The reason it works is compression. JPEG throws away image data permanently to get the file small, which is a good trade for a photo of a beach and a bad trade for the crisp edge of a letter. PNG keeps every pixel exactly as it was, which is a good trade for a logo and an expensive one for a 4000-pixel-wide landscape.
The rest of this page is the part the format comparisons usually skip: how to tell what format your file already is, how to convert it without installing anything, why a transparent logo turns up with a white box behind it, and what to export for each place you are actually uploading to.
The short version: one rule per job
| What you are doing | Export as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Photo for a blog post, landing page or ad | JPEG | Smallest file at a quality nobody will question |
| Logo, icon or product cutout over a colour | PNG | Only PNG can hold a transparent background |
| Screenshot of an app, dashboard or document | PNG | Text and UI lines stay sharp; no fuzz around letters |
| Chart, diagram, line art, flat-colour graphic | PNG | Large areas of identical colour compress well losslessly |
| Square 1:1 avatar or profile image from a photo | JPEG | It is a photo, and the frame is fully filled |
| Square 1:1 logo tile or marketplace thumbnail | PNG | Keeps the edge clean and the corners transparent if needed |
| Photo going to print | JPEG at 90-100% quality, 300 DPI or higher | Neither format supports CMYK, so quality is the lever you have |
| Storing camera originals | Leave them as they are | Every re-save of a JPEG costs a little quality |
JPEG dates from 1992, when the Joint Photographic Experts Group set out to make large photo files small enough to share. PNG arrived in 1994 as a patent-free replacement for GIF, which is why it inherited GIF's strengths - flat colour, sharp edges, transparency - rather than JPEG's.
Both are raster formats: a fixed grid of coloured pixels. Both handle around 16 million colours, so colour range is not what separates them. Neither supports animation. Neither supports CMYK, the colour model commercial printers prefer, so if a printer asks for CMYK you are converting the file in their software, not choosing between these two.
Why PNG is sometimes the smaller file
"PNG files are bigger" is true for photographs and often wrong for graphics. It is worth knowing which side of that line you are on, because it changes what you export.
JPEG compresses by simplifying detail across small blocks of pixels. Photographs are full of gentle variation, so the simplification hides well. A screenshot or a flat logo is the opposite: big areas of one exact colour, with hard edges between them. JPEG has to spend data describing edges it cannot represent cleanly, and it leaves visible fringing - a faint grey halo - around text and around any boundary between two solid colours. PNG stores those same flat areas by noting the repetition, which is cheap.
The result is that a 1600x900 screenshot of a settings panel can be a smaller PNG than a JPEG of the same image, and it will look better as well. A 1600x900 photograph of a street will be several times larger as a PNG with no visible gain.
Don't take that on faith. Open the file in the ImgSearch photo editor, export it once as JPG and once as PNG, and look at the two file sizes in your downloads folder. It takes about thirty seconds and it settles the argument for that specific image, which is the only argument that matters.
How to tell what format a file already is
The extension at the end of the filename is the fast answer, if you can see it.
- Windows. In File Explorer, open the View menu and switch on file name extensions. Filenames then end in .jpg, .jpeg, .png and so on. Right-click a file and choose Properties for the type and the size in KB.
- macOS. Select the file in Finder and press Command-I for Get Info. "Kind" gives the real format, "Size" gives the bytes. To show extensions everywhere, turn on that option in Finder settings under Advanced.
- Phone. Share the file to yourself or open it in a files app; the extension usually appears with the name. Photo libraries often hide it.
Two warnings. .jpg and .jpeg are the same format - the three-letter version is a leftover from when filenames were limited to three characters. And an extension can lie: renaming photo.png to photo.jpg changes nothing inside the file, which is exactly why some uploads fail with "file type not supported" even though the name looks right. If you suspect that, drop the file into an editor that reads the actual contents and export a fresh copy.
How to convert between JPEG and PNG
Conversion is a re-save, not a repair. You open the file and write a new one in the other format.
In the browser, do it in the ImgSearch photo editor, which accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and SVG and lets you download in whichever of those works for your destination. Basic editing needs no sign-up and adds no watermark to what you export.
- Open the editor and upload the file.
- If the destination has a size requirement, crop and resize first - a square crop for an avatar, a 16:9 crop for a thumbnail, and a smaller pixel width if the original came off a phone camera.
- Choose the download format. JPG if it is a photograph, PNG if it has transparency or hard-edged text.
- If a quality or compression slider is offered for JPEG, 75-85% is the working range for web and mobile. Save at 90-100% and 300 DPI or higher only for photographs going to print. If the image contains lettering, don't reach for a high-quality JPEG - export it as PNG instead, or you will get the fringing described above.
- Download, then check the file size before you upload it anywhere.
On a desktop without an editor, the print or export dialog of almost any image viewer will do the same job: Preview on macOS exports to a chosen format, and Paint on Windows saves as either. The step people miss is the resize. Converting a 6000-pixel-wide phone photo to PNG makes a bigger problem, not a smaller one.
And remember what conversion cannot do. PNG is lossless, which means it preserves every pixel it is handed - including blocks and smears a JPEG introduced earlier, now stored in a file several times larger. The damage happened when the JPEG was written, and nothing downstream reverses it.
The white box behind your logo, and how to fix it
When a transparent image is saved as a JPEG, the transparent pixels get filled with a solid colour, usually white. That is the whole story behind the white rectangle around your logo on a coloured header. Somewhere in the chain, the file became a JPEG.
To check whether a PNG is genuinely transparent, open it in an editor and look at the background. Transparency shows as a grey-and-white checkerboard. If you see solid white where you expected nothing, the transparency is already gone and no amount of re-exporting as PNG will bring it back - you need to remove the background again.
Three fixes, depending on what you have:
- You have the original with transparency. Re-export as PNG and upload that. Do not let an intermediate tool convert it to JPEG on the way.
- You only have a flattened copy. Use AI Remove Background in the editor to cut the subject out, then download as PNG. That produces a real transparent file rather than white paint over white.
- It is a logo or icon that needs to scale. Run it through JPG to SVG. A vector file is built from lines and curves rather than pixels, so it stays sharp at any size - useful for a header that has to work at 40 pixels tall and on a 4K screen. Background removal and SVG conversion are the two steps that need an account.
A fourth case worth naming: some upload forms flatten transparency themselves. If a logo looks right in your editor and wrong after upload, export a version with the background colour you actually need baked in, rather than fighting the platform.
Format by destination
| Destination | Send | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn posts | JPEG | Photographs. These platforms re-compress anyway, so give them a clean, correctly sized file and don't pre-shrink it to mush |
| Text-heavy social graphic or quote card | PNG | The lettering survives; a JPEG will fringe around it |
| YouTube thumbnail | JPEG at high quality, 16:9 | It is a photo composite; keep text large and the file tidy |
| Profile picture / 1:1 avatar | JPEG for a face, PNG for a mark | Crop square before uploading rather than letting the platform choose |
| Amazon, Etsy, Shopify product shots | JPEG on white | Cut out first with background removal if the shot is messy |
| Product cutout layered on a coloured page | PNG | The only format that can hold the cutout |
| Email signature | PNG, small pixel dimensions | Flat, hard-edged artwork at tiny sizes is PNG's home ground |
| Favicon | PNG, 32x32 and 48x48 | Same reasoning, smaller again |
| Slides and documents | JPEG for photos, PNG for charts and screenshots | Mixing both in one deck is normal |
| WordPress or Shopify page images | Depends on the image | Photographs as JPEG or WebP; logos, screenshots, charts and cutouts as PNG. Resize to the width the layout renders |
While you are exporting for the web, give the file a descriptive name rather than IMG_4417.jpg - it is a small habit with real search consequences, covered in our post on image file names and SEO.
Where WebP fits
WebP sits alongside JPEG and PNG rather than replacing either, and it can hold transparency, which JPEG cannot. The habit I work to is to serve modern formats from pages I control, if the platform offers them, and to keep a JPEG or PNG copy of everything I hand to somebody else - an email, a marketplace form, a client. That is a practitioner's caution about what accepts what, not a spec-sheet claim.
The ImgSearch editor reads and writes WebP, so you can move a file between it and JPEG or PNG without leaving the browser.
Export at the size the page actually renders
Page speed is the usual reason people are told to prefer JPEG, and it is almost always said without a number. The number worth holding onto is pixel width, not kilobytes.
If your content column renders 800 pixels wide, a 3000-pixel-wide upload is roughly fourteen times the data for no visible benefit. Export at twice the displayed width at most, to cover high-density screens, and no more. Kilobyte targets are rough working figures that vary too much by image to memorise: export, look at the size in your downloads folder, and compare it with the file you are replacing.
What to keep when you download from an image library
Download the largest version you are entitled to, keep it as your master, and export per destination from there. On ImgSearch the free tier gives 5 downloads a day at 1600x900, and the paid plans move that to 2560x1440 - enough headroom to crop into an image and still fill a 1080-pixel-wide layout. You can see what each tier includes on the pricing page.
For AI-generated stock images the same logic applies as for a camera file: the download is your negative. Crop, resize, add text and adjust colour from it, and export a JPEG for the blog, a PNG for the transparent version and a square crop for social - three exports from one master, rather than three generations of re-saved JPEG.
What a JPEG carries that a PNG does not
JPEG files can store and display EXIF data; PNG files cannot embed it. EXIF is the invisible block of information a camera writes into the file: the device, the exposure settings, the date and time, and on a phone with location services on, the GPS coordinates where the shot was taken.
That matters when you are publishing a photograph you took yourself. A JPEG straight off a phone can carry the coordinates of the place you photographed it, and you cannot see that block by looking at the picture.
The simplest way to clear it is to re-export the image from an editor, which writes a fresh file from the pixels rather than copying the original's metadata block. Saving as PNG removes it by definition, since the format has nowhere to put it. If you are selling furniture from your living room, that is a thirty-second precaution worth taking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are PNGs better than JPEGs?
Neither is better in general; they fail in different places. PNG preserves every pixel and supports transparency, which makes it right for logos, screenshots and flat graphics. JPEG discards some data to produce a much smaller file, which makes it right for photographs. Judge by the image, not by the format's reputation.
Should I save photos as JPEG or PNG?
JPEG, in almost every case. Photographs hide JPEG's compression well, and the smaller file is easier to upload, email and serve. Save photos as PNG only when you have cut the background out and need transparency, or when the image contains overlaid text that has to stay perfectly crisp.
Can I convert JPEG to PNG?
Yes - open the file and export it as PNG. It will be a larger file with the same visible quality, including any compression artifacts the JPEG already had. Convert in the direction that helps you: JPEG to PNG when you are about to remove a background, PNG to JPEG when you need a smaller photograph.
Is an iPhone photo a JPEG?
It depends on the camera setting on that particular phone, and phones do not all store the same format. Rather than assume, check the file: on a Mac, select it in Finder and press Command-I to read "Kind"; on Windows, switch on file extensions and read Properties. If the format is something your upload form rejects, open it in an editor and export a JPG.
Does converting a blurry JPEG to PNG make it sharper?
No. PNG faithfully preserves whatever it is given, including blur and blocking that JPEG compression introduced earlier. The only thing you gain is a bigger file. If the image is degraded, go back to the highest-quality original you have.
How do I know if my PNG really has a transparent background?
Open it in an editor and look at the area that should be empty. A grey-and-white checkerboard means genuine transparency; solid white means the transparency has already been flattened. If it has been flattened, remove the background again and download a new PNG.
Why does my image look worse every time I edit it?
Because you are editing a JPEG and re-saving it as a JPEG. Each save re-compresses the whole image and the errors stack up, which is called generation loss. Keep one master file, edit from that master every time, and treat exports as disposable.
What about GIF and TIFF?
GIF is limited to a 256-colour indexed palette, so it is only worth using for short animations - JPEG and PNG cannot animate at all. TIFF supports both lossy and lossless compression and turns up in print and archive workflows, but it is too heavy and too poorly supported for the web. For online work, the choice really is JPEG, PNG or WebP.
Which format should I use for a 1:1 square image?
Aspect ratio and file format are separate decisions. Crop to 1:1 first, then pick the format by content: JPEG for a square photo, PNG for a square logo tile or anything with transparent corners. The editor's crop and resize tools will get you to the square before you choose the download format.
Final Thoughts
The decision itself takes a second: photograph means JPEG, transparency or hard edges mean PNG. What actually goes wrong is downstream - a 6000-pixel upload in an 800-pixel column, a transparent logo flattened to white, a file re-saved six times until the text went soft.
All three are fixed by the same habit. Keep one master, resize to the pixel dimensions the destination renders, and export a fresh copy per platform in the format that platform handles best.
If the file in front of you is the wrong format or the wrong size, open it in the editor and export the version you need. Crop, resize, text and filters are free and need no account; background removal and vector conversion sit behind a sign-in.
