JPEG vs PNG vs WebP: Which Format Should You Use?
A decision table for the three formats that cover almost everything, and why the right answer depends on where the image is going rather than on quality.
Almost every image question ends with the same three candidates. The choice is not about which format is "best" — it is about what is in the image and where it is going.
The short version
| Your image | Use | Why | |---|---|---| | A photograph | JPEG | Small, universally supported, handles continuous tone well | | A screenshot, chart, map or logo | PNG | Lossless edges; JPEG turns text and lines into fuzzy halos | | Something with transparency | PNG (or WebP) | JPEG has no alpha channel at all | | Images served on a site you control | WebP | 25–35% smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality | | Anything you email, upload, or print | JPEG | Accepted everywhere; WebP still is not |
Why photographs go to JPEG
A photograph is smooth gradients everywhere. JPEG discards high-frequency detail that the eye barely notices in that kind of content, and the file shrinks dramatically — often 5 to 10 times smaller than PNG.
Why everything else goes to PNG
PNG is lossless, so hard edges come out exactly. Screenshots, logos, charts and UI captures are made of hard edges and flat colour — precisely what JPEG handles worst. It smears edges into ringing artifacts at any quality setting, and it cannot store transparency.
Where WebP fits
WebP is technically better than both for web delivery: smaller than JPEG at equal quality, and it supports transparency like PNG. The catch is everything outside the browser. Older editors cannot open it, many upload forms reject it, and printing services often do not accept it.
So: WebP for images you serve yourself, JPEG for images you hand to someone else. If you need to convert, that is a one-way trip with a small quality cost — see our guidance on the trade-offs.
The size argument, honestly
"WebP is 30% smaller" is true at equal visual quality and worth having. But it is not the whole picture:
- On flat-colour graphics, WebP's advantage grows — JPEG wastes the most bits there.
- On already-compressed files, converting between formats recovers nothing. Re-encoding always costs a little.
- For very small targets, resizing matters far more than format. A 4000-pixel-wide photo squeezed to 50 KB is a bad JPEG and mostly wasted pixels.
A workflow that avoids the usual mistakes
1. Keep one high-quality master of anything you care about — the original export or a lossless copy. 2. From that master, produce what each destination needs: WebP for your own site, JPEG around q85 for everything else, PNG when transparency matters. 3. Check the result at 100% on a detailed area — text, edges, coloured detail. Not on the sky. 4. Never treat a delivery format as your master. JPEG and WebP are outputs, not archives.
Two things worth knowing before you convert
Transparency does not survive a JPEG conversion. Transparent pixels have to become some solid colour. This is where logos get ruined: a tool that picks black will destroy a logo designed for a light page. Our PNG to JPG converter composites onto white and warns you beforehand.
Metadata is not part of the picture. EXIF — camera model, timestamps, and often GPS coordinates — travels inside the file. If a photo is going somewhere public, stripping it costs nothing: it can be removed without re-encoding, leaving every pixel untouched.