Image Converter

PNG is lossless: every pixel survives, and it supports full transparency. That makes it right for logos, icons, screenshots, diagrams and anything with sharp edges or flat colour. It is a poor fit for photographs, where lossless compression produces files several times larger than they need to be.

JPG is lossy and tuned for photographs. It discards detail the eye is least sensitive to, achieving large savings on natural images at a quality most people cannot distinguish from the original. It has no transparency channel, and it blurs the hard edges of text and line art, so screenshots suffer noticeably.

WebP does both jobs. Lossy WebP typically produces files around a quarter to a third smaller than JPEG at matched visual quality, and lossless WebP beats PNG on most graphics — while still supporting transparency. Every current browser reads it; the caveat is older desktop software and some print workflows, which may not.

PNG and WebP both store an alpha channel, so a logo can sit on any colour without a visible box around it. JPEG has no such channel. Converting a transparent image to JPG therefore forces a decision about what the see-through pixels become.

The background colour picker makes that choice explicit. White suits documents and most web pages; matching the colour of the page the image will sit on is the trick for keeping a logo looking cut out. Without a background colour, transparent areas would come out black — the usual explanation for a logo that mysteriously gains a dark rectangle.

If you need the transparency itself, do not convert to JPG at all. Convert to PNG or WebP, both of which keep it intact.

Converting a JPG to PNG does not restore what JPEG compression removed. The detail is already gone; the PNG simply stores the damaged pixels losslessly, usually in a much larger file. Convert to PNG when you need transparency or are about to edit, not in the hope of improving a photo.

Every save of a lossy format compounds the loss. Editing a JPEG and re-saving it repeatedly softens detail a little each time, a phenomenon known as generation loss. Keep an original — ideally in a lossless format — and produce lossy copies from it rather than from the last copy.

Re-encoding through a browser canvas also strips metadata: EXIF tags, camera settings, timestamps and any embedded GPS coordinates do not survive. That is a genuine privacy win when posting photographs publicly, and something to be aware of if you were relying on those fields.