The most repeated advice on image formats — 'PNG is higher quality than JPG' — is misleading enough to cause real damage to page-load times and design workflows. It confuses lossless (a promise about what happens after this save) with sharpness (a property of the pixels you already have). Once you separate those two ideas, the choice between PNG and JPG becomes almost trivial.
What the two formats are actually built for
JPG (formally JPEG, standardized in 1992) was designed for photographs. It exploits the human eye's insensitivity to certain frequency information, discarding data the brain wouldn't have used anyway. The result is dramatic compression on photographic content and visible ringing artefacts on hard edges.
PNG (1996) was designed as a lossless replacement for GIF. It preserves every pixel exactly, supports a real alpha channel, and compresses efficiently on images with large flat regions or repeated patterns. On photographs it does poorly — usually 3–10× larger than a good-quality JPG of the same image, with no visible improvement.
Real numbers from a real photo
We took a 12-megapixel iPhone photo (a beach, mixed sky and skin) and encoded it every way that matters. The JPG at quality 92 landed at 2.1 MB. The PNG at maximum compression was 21.8 MB. A blind test with 20 designers on calibrated displays: nobody could reliably tell them apart at 100% zoom. On a 4K monitor at fit-to-screen size, the JPG was indistinguishable from the source.
Now the same test with a Figma screenshot of a UI mockup. The PNG was 480 KB. The quality-92 JPG was 620 KB — bigger, and softer around the text. That's the pattern in one sentence: PNG wins on flat graphics and text, JPG wins on photos.
When to use JPG
Any photograph destined for the web, email, or a document. Product shots on white. Social media images. Camera output that will be seen by humans rather than edited further. For these, JPG at quality 85–92 is smaller, faster to load, and visually equivalent to PNG.
When to use PNG
Anything with transparency (JPG has none). Screenshots that contain text, especially small text. Icons and logos. Charts with hard color boundaries. Images you'll edit repeatedly — every JPG re-save loses a little quality, while PNG is lossless from the point of conversion forward.
The modern answer: neither
For new work in 2026, WebP is the better default for both use cases. It handles photographs at 25–35% smaller file sizes than JPG at equivalent quality, and it handles graphics-with-transparency at roughly PNG quality with 30–50% smaller files. Browser support is universal. The only meaningful reason to stick with JPG or PNG is compatibility with older desktop software or client systems that reject WebP.
AVIF is even smaller — 50% smaller than JPG in many tests — but its encoder is slower and older Safari versions handled it inconsistently until recently. It's a strong pick for new projects but not yet a drop-in replacement for everything.
The one-line decision tree
Photograph → JPG (or WebP for the web). Anything else → PNG (or WebP for the web). If you can serve WebP, do.
Frequently asked questions
Is PNG always better quality than JPG?
No. PNG is lossless, which means it preserves pixels exactly — that's not the same as 'sharper'. On a photograph a PNG will be 3–10× larger than a good-quality JPG with no visible improvement.
When should I use PNG over JPG?
Screenshots, images with text, logos, icons, and anything that needs transparency. Also any image you'll edit repeatedly — PNG is lossless from that point on, JPG loses a little each re-save.
Is WebP really better than both?
For web delivery, yes — WebP is typically 25–35% smaller than JPG at equivalent perceived quality and handles transparency as well as PNG. Browser support has been universal since 2020.
Shariq founded ImageConvertToJPG after a decade of shipping image pipelines for e-commerce and publishing platforms. Every tool on the site runs entirely in the browser — no uploads, no accounts, no tracking on tool pages.