PNG vs JPG: what is the difference, and which should you use?

PNG is a lossless format. It stores a recipe for every pixel, so what you save is exactly what you get back — sharp edges, flat colour and text stay crisp no matter how many times the file is opened and saved. It also carries an alpha channel: pixels can be fully or partly transparent, which is why logos and icons sit cleanly on any background. The trade-off is size. Lossless packing only shrinks repetition, and a photograph has almost none, so a photo saved as PNG is often several times the size of the same picture as a JPG.

JPG (or JPEG — the same format, two spellings) is lossy. Its compression is tuned for photographs: it discards fine detail your eye tends not to notice — faint noise, tiny colour shifts — and in return the file shrinks dramatically. At a quality setting around 75–82 the difference from the original is usually invisible on screen. Two limits follow from that design: there is no transparency, and every save throws away a little more, so a JPG re-saved again and again slowly degrades. For the underlying mechanics see lossy vs lossless compression, and the format pages for PNG and JPG.

Match the format to what is in the picture, not to what the file happened to arrive as:

• Choose PNG for logos, icons, screenshots, diagrams, charts, scanned text and UI mock-ups — anything with hard edges, flat colour or type — and for any image that needs a transparent background or that you will keep editing.
• Choose JPG for photographs: camera and phone pictures, product shots, portraits, scans of photos, and any large image headed for email, a website or an upload form where size matters more than pixel-exactness.

The two classic mistakes are mirror images of each other. A photo saved as PNG looks no better but weighs several times more — the trap explained in why PNG files are so large. A logo saved as JPG picks up fuzzy halos around its edges and loses its transparency for good. If an image is destined only for the web, WebP and AVIF can do both jobs in one smaller file — see the best image format for a website — but PNG and JPG remain the safe pair that every app, printer and upload form accepts.

Once you have decided, converting takes seconds and nothing leaves your device. The EditItAll image converter runs entirely in your browser:

1. Open the converter and drop in your files — one image or a whole folder's worth. Batches are processed together.
2. Pick the output format. Going to JPG, you also set a quality level; around 80 keeps a photo looking identical while cutting the size. Going to PNG, the result is lossless, so quality is not a decision you have to make.
3. Read the before and after size shown next to each file. There is no target-size box: the size is the outcome of the quality you chose, so nudge the slider and convert again if it needs to be smaller.
4. Download. A single file saves directly; a batch comes down as one ZIP.

Prefer a page built for the job? Use PNG to JPG or JPG to PNG directly. If the format is already right and the file is simply too big, skip the conversion and use the PNG compressor or JPG compressor instead. Either way EXIF and GPS metadata are stripped on export, there is no account, no watermark and no limit — and you can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it keeps working, which is the plainest proof nothing is uploaded.

Conversion changes the container, not the picture inside it, and two consequences catch people out. Going from PNG to JPG flattens transparency: JPG has no alpha channel, so see-through areas are painted onto a solid background — white by default — and there is no way to get them back from the JPG. If the holes matter, stay on PNG (or WebP), as explained in why a PNG lost its transparency.

Going the other way, JPG to PNG does not restore quality. The detail JPG discarded is gone; PNG simply stores the already-lossy picture exactly, so the file grows — often a lot — while looking identical. Convert to PNG only when you need transparency added later, or a format that will not degrade with further edits. In every case keep the original: the JPG is the share copy, the PNG the master. For more decisions like this, browse the converting images guides.