Image format guide

The universal photo format. Small files, opens everywhere, no transparency.

Lossless with full transparency. The standard for screenshots, logos and UI graphics.

Google's web format: ~30% smaller than JPEG, supports transparency and animation.

The best compression available in browsers today — often half the size of JPEG.

The designated JPEG successor: superb quality, lossless JPEG recompression, HDR.

A tiny, blazing-fast lossless format loved by game developers.

The ancient animation format. 256 colors, universally supported, huge files.

Uncompressed Windows bitmaps. Huge files — almost always worth converting.

The professional print and scanning format. High quality, very large, not web-viewable.

The favicon and Windows icon container format.

The iPhone photo format. Half the size of JPEG — until you try to open it anywhere else.

Vector graphics — infinitely scalable. Rasterize to PNG/JPEG for apps that need pixels.

Photoshop working files. Convert the flattened image to PNG or JPEG for sharing.

A retro format that lives on in game modding and 3D texture pipelines.

Hollywood’s HDR format for VFX renders. Tone-map to PNG/JPEG for viewing.

Canon DSLR RAW files. Convert to JPEG to share, keep the RAW as your negative.

Nikon RAW files. Develop to JPEG or PNG right in your browser.

Sony Alpha RAW files. Convert to JPEG without installing anything.

The standardized RAW format used by Adobe, Leica, and phone “Pro” camera modes.