Updated 2026-09-15
JPG vs PNG vs WebP: Which Format Should You Use?
A direct comparison of the three formats every website and upload form expects, with a decision table and the trade-offs that actually matter.
Three formats, three different jobs
Almost every image you handle on the web is one of three formats, and most confusion comes from treating them as interchangeable. They are not. Each was designed for a different problem, and picking the wrong one means either a bloated file or a visibly damaged image.
JPEG, usually written JPG, arrived in 1992 and was built for photographs. It uses lossy compression, meaning it permanently discards detail the human eye is unlikely to notice in exchange for a dramatically smaller file. PNG arrived a few years later as a lossless format for graphics, preserving every pixel exactly and adding support for transparency. WebP, released by Google in 2010, is the modern attempt to cover both jobs at once with better compression than either.
The quick decision table
If you want a single answer without the reasoning, this table covers the overwhelming majority of real cases.
| What you have | Best format | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Photograph for a website | WebP | Smallest file at equivalent quality; supported by all current browsers |
| Photograph for a form or printer | JPG | Universally accepted, including by older and offline software |
| Logo or icon with transparency | PNG | Lossless and supports an alpha channel; edges stay crisp |
| Screenshot containing text | PNG | Lossy compression smears small text; lossless keeps it readable |
| Illustration for a modern website | WebP | Keeps transparency and sharp edges at a smaller size than PNG |
| Master copy you will edit later | PNG | No generation loss when you re-save repeatedly |
| Email attachment | JPG | Small and guaranteed to open in any mail client |
Why JPG is still everywhere
JPG survives because its compatibility is effectively total. Every browser, operating system, printer driver, photo kiosk, government portal, and decades-old enterprise application can open a JPG. When a form lists accepted formats, JPG is always among them. That reliability is worth more than a few kilobytes in any situation where you cannot control what software the recipient uses.
Its weaknesses are specific and worth knowing. JPG cannot store transparency, so any transparent area is flattened onto a solid background, usually white. It also loses quality every time you save, which is called generation loss. Opening a JPG, making a small edit, and saving it repeatedly will visibly degrade the image over several cycles, so keep a lossless master if you expect to edit more than once.
Why PNG files get so large
PNG is lossless, which means it stores enough information to reconstruct the original pixels exactly. For a logo with twelve flat colours, that is extremely efficient, because large uniform areas compress down to almost nothing. For a photograph, where practically every pixel differs slightly from its neighbours, there is very little repetition to exploit, and the file balloons.
This is why a photo saved as PNG can easily be five to ten times larger than the same photo as JPG at a quality most people cannot distinguish. If you have a large PNG that turns out to be a photograph, converting it to JPG or WebP is usually the single biggest file-size win available to you.
- PNG excels at: logos, icons, screenshots, diagrams, flat illustrations, anything with transparency.
- PNG is a poor choice for: photographs, scanned pages, and anything destined for an attachment size limit.
Where WebP fits now
WebP is the format most people should be using for the web and most are not, largely out of habit. It handles both lossy and lossless compression, supports transparency like PNG, and typically produces files noticeably smaller than either JPG or PNG at comparable visual quality. For a content-heavy page, switching images to WebP is often the easiest performance improvement available.
The remaining friction is not browser support, which has been solid across Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari for years. It is everything outside the browser: some desktop editors, a few print workflows, older intranet applications, and the occasional email client still do not recognise it. The practical rule is to use WebP when you control the destination and know it is a modern web context, and fall back to JPG when you are handing a file to someone else and cannot verify what they will open it with.
A note on converting between them
Conversion cannot recover information that has already been discarded. Converting a heavily compressed JPG to PNG produces a large, lossless copy of a damaged image, not a repaired one. Similarly, converting JPG to WebP and back to JPG applies lossy compression twice, compounding the artefacts.
The healthy pattern is to keep one high-quality master, ideally lossless or a camera original, and export from that master to whatever format each destination needs. Convert once, not repeatedly. All of the conversions discussed here are available on this site and run entirely in your browser.