JPG vs PNG vs WEBP: Which Image Format Should You Use?

Most people pick an image format by accident. Your phone hands you a JPG, a screenshot arrives as a PNG, and a website you downloaded from gives you a WEBP you can't open in anything. That's usually fine — until a page loads slowly, an upload gets rejected, or a logo comes out with an ugly white box behind it.

Here's what actually separates the three formats, and a simple rule for picking the right one.

The short answer

• Photographs → JPG (or WEBP if it's for a website)
• Logos, icons, screenshots, anything with sharp text or transparency → PNG
• Images on your own website → WEBP, with a JPG or PNG fallback if you support very old browsers

If you stop reading here, you'll get it right most of the time. The rest of this explains why, and covers the cases where the simple rule breaks down.

JPG: built for photographs

JPG (also written JPEG — same format, different spelling) has been around since 1992, and it is still the default for photography for one reason: it throws away data your eye doesn't notice.

Human vision is much more sensitive to brightness than to colour, and much better at seeing large shapes than fine texture. JPG exploits both. It stores colour information at lower resolution than brightness, and it discards subtle detail in busy areas. On a photo of a face, a forest, or a sunset, you can throw away 80–90% of the file and most people won't see a difference at normal viewing size.

Where JPG falls apart: sharp edges. Text, logos, line art, and screenshots are made almost entirely of hard boundaries, and JPG's compression smears them into faint halos and blotches — the artefacts you've seen around white text on a coloured background. JPG also has no transparency at all. Save a logo as JPG and the transparent background becomes solid white.

One more thing worth knowing: JPG is lossy every time you save. Open a JPG, crop it, save it, repeat — quality degrades a little on each round trip. Keep an original somewhere if the image matters.

PNG: built for graphics

PNG takes the opposite approach. It is lossless — the pixels you save are the exact pixels you get back, forever, no matter how many times you re-save. It also supports a full alpha channel, meaning proper transparency including soft edges and drop shadows.

This makes PNG excellent for logos, icons, UI screenshots, charts, diagrams, and any image with text in it. Those images tend to have large areas of flat colour, which is exactly what PNG's compression is good at squeezing.

Where PNG falls apart: photographs. A photo has almost no flat colour — every pixel is slightly different from its neighbour — so PNG has nothing to compress and the file stays enormous. A photo that's 800KB as a JPG can easily be 5MB or more as a PNG, with no visible improvement.

This is the single most common image mistake we see: someone exports a photograph as PNG because they've heard PNG is "higher quality", then wonders why their page takes six seconds to load.

WEBP: the modern compromise

WEBP, developed by Google, is the format that does both jobs. It has a lossy mode that competes with JPG and a lossless mode that competes with PNG — and it supports transparency in both. In typical use it produces files roughly 25–35% smaller than JPG or PNG at comparable visual quality.

For a website, that saving is significant. Images are usually the heaviest thing on a page, and page weight feeds directly into Core Web Vitals — particularly Largest Contentful Paint, which is often literally the hero image.

Where WEBP falls apart: outside the browser. Every current browser supports it, but plenty of desktop software, print services, and upload forms still don't. If you're sending a file to a client, a printer, or a government portal, send JPG or PNG. Use WEBP for images you're publishing on the web yourself.

What about AVIF and HEIC?

Two formats you'll increasingly bump into:

AVIF compresses even better than WEBP — often another 20% smaller again — and browser support is now broad. The trade-offs are slower encoding and patchier support in non-browser software. It's a reasonable choice for a website today, but keep a WEBP or JPG fallback.

HEIC is what your iPhone saves photos as by default. It's efficient — roughly half the size of an equivalent JPG — but support outside the Apple ecosystem is poor, which is why so many people end up needing to convert HEIC to JPG before uploading anything.

A five-second decision process

Ask yourself two questions:

1. Does the image need a transparent background, or is it mostly flat colour, sharp lines, or text? If yes → PNG (or lossless WEBP for the web).
2. Is it a photograph? If yes → JPG for sending to people, WEBP for publishing on your own site.

That's genuinely it. The edge cases — animated images, print-ready CMYK files, RAW photography — have their own formats and don't belong in this comparison.

One thing format choice won't fix

Choosing the right format helps, but it won't save you from an image that's simply too big. A 4000×3000 photo displayed in a 600-pixel-wide column is wasting roughly 97% of its data no matter how you encode it. Resize first, then compress, then pick your format — in that order.

Converting between formats

All of these conversions run in your browser on PicSqueezer — nothing is uploaded to a server: