JPG vs PNG: Which One Should You Actually Use?

The short version: photographs go in JPG, everything else goes in PNG. That covers about nine cases in ten. The rest of this page is the reasoning, the numbers, and the handful of destinations where the answer flips.

They are built for different pictures

JPG is lossy. It throws away detail your eye is bad at noticing — mostly fine colour variation — and it is extremely good at this on smooth, continuous subjects like skin, sky and landscape. It is bad at hard edges. Put black text or a sharp logo edge through a JPG and you get faint halos around it, called ringing.

PNG is lossless. Nothing is discarded, so text stays crisp and a flat colour stays exactly that colour. The cost is size, and the cost is not small: PNG compresses flat areas brilliantly and photographs terribly, because a photo has almost no repeated pixels for it to work with.

A number from our own build makes the point. Our circle crop tool outputs PNG, because a circle needs transparent corners. An uncapped circle cut from a 12-megapixel phone photo came out at 12 MB — larger than the JPG it was cut from, and useless as an avatar. We now cap that tool at 1400 px for exactly this reason.

Only PNG has transparency

JPG has no transparency at all. There is no partial support, no workaround.

This is usually the whole decision for a logo, an icon, a signature or a cut-out. If the image needs to sit on a coloured background without a white box around it, it is a PNG (or a WebP, or ideally an SVG).

It also creates a specific trap. When you convert a PNG to JPG, the transparent areas have to become something — and unless the converter paints white underneath first, they become black. Ours fills white before encoding, which is what almost everyone wants, but it is worth knowing why a scanned signature sometimes comes out as a black rectangle elsewhere.

"Which is better quality?" — the honest answer

PNG is technically higher fidelity, because it is lossless. For a photograph, that advantage is invisible at normal viewing and costs you five to ten times the file size. For a screenshot or a logo it is very visible indeed.

One thing PNG cannot do is repair. Converting a JPG to PNG is lossless from that moment on, but it cannot undo what the JPG already discarded. If you are handed a blurry, blocky JPG, saving it as a PNG makes a bigger file of the same blurry, blocky picture.

The place lossy actually hurts is repeated saving. Open a JPG, edit it, save it, repeat — each pass re-encodes and loses a little more. PNG does not degrade that way. If a file is going to be edited several times before it is finished, keep the working copy as PNG and export a JPG at the end.

By destination

Websites

Photos as JPG, interface graphics and logos as PNG — and if you can, WebP for both. WebP is roughly a third the size of a PNG at the same quality, supports transparency, and is supported by every current browser. This is the one case where the right answer is neither of the two formats in the question.

Printing

Format is not what decides print quality — resolution is. A 300 DPI JPG at high quality prints indistinguishably from a PNG of the same picture, and the PNG is several times larger for no gain. What actually ruins prints is not having enough pixels, which is a separate question we covered in is 300 DPI high resolution.

Instagram, Facebook and other social platforms

They re-encode whatever you upload, usually to JPG, at their own settings. So the format you choose barely survives the trip. Upload the best-quality version you have and let them do their thing — the one genuinely bad move is uploading something you already compressed hard, because their re-encode then compounds your losses.

Email signatures

JPG or PNG, and specifically not WebP. Classic Outlook on Windows still will not render WebP, and an email signature is the one place where the older, duller format is the correct engineering choice. Use PNG if the logo has transparency, JPG if it is a photo, and keep it small — signatures sit at the bottom of a message, so they are the first thing to vanish when a client clips a long email. More on that in how many KB an email signature should be.

YouTube thumbnails

JPG. A thumbnail is a photographic composite viewed at small size, it usually has no transparency, and there is an upload size limit to stay under. PNG buys nothing here and costs a lot.

JPG, JPEG, and the third option

JPG and JPEG are the same format. The three-letter version is a leftover from when Windows filenames allowed only three characters for an extension. Nothing else differs, and no tool treats them differently.

The option people forget is SVG, and for a logo it beats both. SVG is a set of drawing instructions rather than pixels, so it is sharp at any size and usually tiny. We should be straight about this: FileFits cannot make an SVG out of a PNG. Nothing honestly can — the shapes have to be redrawn, which is a designer's job, not a converter's. If you have the original vector file from whoever made your logo, that is the file to use.

Converting between them

All of these run entirely in your browser, and the file is never uploaded:

• PNG to JPG — flattens transparency onto white.
• JPG to PNG — lossless from here on.
• PNG to WebP and JPG to WebP — noticeably smaller at the same quality.
• WebP to JPG and WebP to PNG — for the forms and apps that still refuse WebP.

If what you actually need is a specific file size rather than a specific format, a target like 100 KB gets there by adjusting quality and, if necessary, dimensions — rather than by switching format and hoping.