JPG vs PNG: What's the Difference?

JPG and PNG are the two image formats you meet every day, and choosing the wrong one is the most common reason for blurry screenshots or oversized photos. The difference comes down to one idea: lossy versus lossless compression.

JPG: small files for photos

JPG (or JPEG) throws away detail your eye is unlikely to notice – fine textures, tiny colour shifts – to make files dramatically smaller. A 12-megapixel phone photo that would take 30 MB uncompressed usually fits in 3–5 MB as a JPG.

The trade-off appears around sharp edges. Text, lines and flat colours get faint “halos”, called compression artefacts, and every new save loses a little more. JPG also has no transparency.

PNG: exact pixels and transparency

PNG keeps every pixel exactly as it was. That makes it perfect for screenshots, logos, icons, diagrams and anything with text. PNG also supports transparency, so a logo can sit on any background without a white box around it.

The price is size: a photo saved as PNG is often five to ten times larger than the same photo as a JPG, with no visible benefit.

Which one should you use?

• Photos (people, landscapes, products): JPG.
• Screenshots, text, charts, UI: PNG.
• Logos and icons with transparent background: PNG (or SVG if you have it).
• Websites: consider WEBP, which beats both in size.

Converting between them

Converting a JPG to PNG does not bring lost detail back, but it stops further loss when you keep editing the image – useful before adding text or annotations. Use JPG to PNG for that.

Going the other way, PNG to JPG shrinks large PNG photos. Transparent areas need a background colour, because JPG cannot store transparency – the converter lets you pick it.