JPG, PNG, WebP or HEIC — Which Should You Use?

Four formats cover almost everything you’ll meet: JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC. Choosing between them isn’t a matter of taste — each was designed for a different job, and picking the wrong one is why photos look blocky, screenshots come out blurry, or a file won’t open at all.

The one-line version

Format	Use it for	Avoid it for
JPG	Photographs; anything that must open everywhere	Text, screenshots, transparency, repeated re-saving
PNG	Screenshots, logos, diagrams, transparency	Photographs (files get huge)
WebP	Websites; photos and graphics at the smallest size	Print workflows, very old software
HEIC	Storage on Apple devices	Sharing with anyone not on Apple

Lossy vs lossless — the idea behind everything else

Lossy formats (JPG, WebP in normal use, HEIC) throw away detail the eye is bad at noticing, then store an approximation. That’s why a 12-megapixel photo fits in 3 MB instead of 36 MB. The trade-off is that the discarded detail is gone forever, and every re-save discards a little more — the “generation loss” that makes a meme degrade after being screenshotted twenty times.

Lossless formats (PNG, WebP in lossless mode) store the exact pixels. Re-saving costs nothing in quality, but files are far larger for photographic content, because photographs have no repeated patterns to compress.

That single distinction explains most format advice. Photographs have smooth gradients and noise the eye can’t track precisely, so lossy compression is nearly free. Screenshots and logos have hard edges and flat colour, which lossy compression smears and lossless compression squeezes brilliantly.

JPG (JPEG)

Thirty years old, universally supported, still the default for photographs. No transparency, no animation, 8 bits per channel. The quality setting controls how aggressively detail is discarded:

Quality	Typical size (12 MP photo)	Visible difference
100	6–8 MB	None, and wasteful — almost no gain over 95
90	3–4 MB	None
80	1.5–2 MB	None at normal viewing size
70	1 MB	Slight softening in fine detail
50	500 KB	Visible blocking in skies and gradients

80–90 is the sweet spot for anything you’ll look at rather than edit. Save at 100 only for an intermediate file that will be edited again — and even then, PNG or the original raw file is a better choice.

PNG

Lossless, supports full alpha transparency, and compresses flat colour extremely well. A screenshot of a text document might be 100 KB as PNG and look perfect; the same screenshot as JPG at similar size will show visible fringing around every letter, because JPG’s frequency-based compression handles hard edges badly.

Use PNG for screenshots, UI mockups, logos, charts, line art, icons, anything with transparency, and any image you’ll edit repeatedly.

Don’t use PNG for photographs. A 12-megapixel photo saved as PNG is typically 15–25 MB — five to ten times the JPG — with no visible benefit.

WebP

Google’s format, supported by every current browser and most modern software. It does both lossy and lossless, supports transparency and animation, and is genuinely better than what it replaces: 25–35% smaller than JPG at equivalent quality, and usually smaller than PNG for lossless graphics too.

If your images are destined for a website, WebP is the right default — smaller pages load faster and rank better. The caveats: some older desktop applications and print workflows won’t open it, and a few upload forms reject it. Keep a JPG copy for those.

AVIF, the newer format, compresses better still (another 20% or so) but encodes slowly and support is thinner. Worth watching; not yet the default.

HEIC

Apple’s container format, based on the HEVC video codec, and the reason so many people search for “HEIC to JPG”. iPhones have saved photos this way by default since iOS 11 because it stores the same quality in about half the space — a real benefit when a phone holds thousands of photos.

The problem is everything outside Apple’s ecosystem. Windows needs a paid extension to display HEIC, many web forms reject it, and most photo editors can’t open it. If you share photos with Windows or Android users, you have two options:

1. Change the camera setting: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible saves JPG directly, at the cost of roughly double the storage.
2. Keep HEIC and convert when sharing — a better use of your phone’s storage, and what most people end up doing. The HEIC to JPG converter handles batches in the browser.

Practical recipes

• Photo for a web form with a 2 MB limit: JPG at quality 85, resized to 1920 px on the long side. Usually lands around 400 KB — the image compressor does both in one step.
• Screenshot for documentation: PNG at full size. If it’s enormous, WebP lossless.
• Product photos for a website: WebP at quality 80, sized to the largest they’ll display.
• Photos to email to family: JPG at 85, resized to 1600 px. Ten then fit comfortably in one message.
• Logo with transparency: PNG — or SVG if you have the vector original, since SVG scales to any size with no file-size cost.
• Print at 8 × 10 inches: the original file at full resolution, at least 2400 × 3000 px. Don’t compress for print.

Two mistakes worth avoiding

Re-compressing repeatedly. Every time a JPG is opened and re-saved, it loses a little more. Always go back to the original when making a new version rather than editing the compressed copy.

Converting to a “better” format to gain quality. Saving a JPG as PNG produces a much larger file containing exactly the same visible information — the detail JPG discarded is not recoverable. Converting only changes the container.

The image converter handles all four formats in batches, entirely in your browser.