Guides ·
JPEG vs PNG — which should you use?
A side-by-side comparison, the reason the two behave in opposite ways on photos and screenshots, and the three cases where the obvious rule is wrong.
Use JPEG for photographs and PNG for screenshots, logos, diagrams and anything containing text. That single rule is right almost every time, and the reason is that the two formats compress in fundamentally different ways.
The comparison
| JPEG | PNG | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Photographs, and anything with smooth gradations | Screenshots, logos, charts, text, line art |
| Compression | Lossy — discards detail permanently | Lossless — every pixel is recoverable |
| Transparency | Not supported | Supported, including partial transparency |
| Animation | No | No (that is APNG or GIF) |
| Typical photo, 12MP | 2–4 MB | 15–30 MB |
| Typical screenshot, 1080p | 400 KB, with visible fuzz around text | 150 KB, perfectly sharp |
| Re-saving repeatedly | Degrades each time | No degradation ever |
| Colour depth | 8 bits per channel | Up to 16 bits per channel |
| Browser support | Universal | Universal |
The two rows that surprise people are the size rows, because they run in opposite directions. On a photograph JPEG is roughly ten times smaller than PNG. On a screenshot, PNG is usually smaller than JPEG — and sharper.
Why the rule works
JPEG discards detail the eye is bad at noticing: fine variations in colour, and sharp transitions. Photographs are full of the first and almost devoid of the second, so JPEG removes enormous amounts of data with no visible cost.
Screenshots and logos are the opposite. They are mostly flat colour with hard edges — exactly the transitions JPEG handles worst. Compressing text as JPEG produces a halo of grey speckle around every letter, which is the “why does my screenshot look fuzzy” question that brings most people here.
PNG compresses by finding repeated patterns instead. Flat areas of identical colour compress to almost nothing, which is why a screenshot of a document can be smaller as a PNG than as a JPEG. Photographs have almost no exactly-repeated pixels, so PNG barely compresses them at all.
The three cases where the rule changes
You need transparency on a photograph. PNG is the only one of the two that can do it, so PNG wins by default — accept the file size, or use WebP, which does both.
The image will be edited and re-saved repeatedly. Every JPEG save re-compresses and loses a little more. Work in PNG and export to JPEG once at the end.
It is going on a website you control. Then usually neither. WebP is around 30% smaller than JPEG on photographs and smaller than PNG on graphics, with transparency, and every current browser supports it. Keep JPEG and PNG for files you send to other people.
Common questions
Does converting PNG to JPEG lose quality? Yes, once, at the moment of conversion. The result is then stable unless you re-save it again. Converting a photograph is usually invisible; converting a screenshot is usually obvious.
Does converting JPEG to PNG restore quality? No. The detail JPEG discarded is gone. You get a lossless copy of a lossy image — a much larger file containing exactly the same visible information.
Which is better for printing? Neither is about print quality. What matters is pixel dimensions and DPI. A 300 DPI JPEG at high quality prints indistinguishably from a PNG of the same dimensions.
Why is my PNG photograph 25 MB? Because PNG is lossless and photographs contain almost no repeated pixels, so there is nothing to compress away. This is working as designed; it is simply the wrong format for that image.
Is JPG different from JPEG? No. Identical format. The three-letter extension is a leftover from MS-DOS, which allowed only three characters.
Converting between them
Both conversions run in your browser here, with nothing uploaded — which matters more than it sounds for the screenshots people most often need to convert, since those tend to contain exactly the information you would not want on someone else’s server.