JPEG or PNG: Which One Should You Use?

The short answer

Use JPEG for photographs you are publishing or sending. Use PNG when you need a transparent background, when the image is a screenshot, logo, chart or anything containing text, and whenever you are going to keep editing the file.

That covers almost every real decision. The rest of this explains why, and the two cases where getting it wrong actually costs you something.

What the two formats really do

JPEG throws things away on purpose. It looks at a photograph, decides which detail your eye is least likely to miss, and discards it to make the file dramatically smaller. That is why a 12 megapixel photo can sit in 3MB instead of 36MB. The trade is that the discarded detail is gone for good.

PNG keeps everything. Save a PNG a thousand times and the thousandth is identical to the first. It also supports transparency, which JPEG does not. The trade is file size: the same photograph as a PNG is often five to ten times larger.

Neither is better. They solve different problems.

Where JPEG wins

Photographs. Anything with smooth gradients, skin, sky, foliage or shadow. The format was designed around how human vision works with continuous tone images, and on that material it is remarkably good. At a high quality setting most people cannot tell a JPEG from the original, at a fraction of the size.

Publishing to the web, sending by email, uploading to social platforms: JPEG, every time. The platforms are going to recompress it anyway.

Where PNG wins

Transparency. If any part of the image needs to be see through, PNG is the only one of the two that can do it. This is why a logo saved as a JPEG arrives with an ugly white box around it.

Text and sharp edges. JPEG compression works by smoothing, and text is nothing but hard edges. Save a screenshot as a JPEG and you get faint coloured smudges around every letter. Save it as a PNG and it is pixel exact.

Screenshots, charts, diagrams, pixel art, line drawings. Same reason. Flat colours and hard edges are exactly what JPEG handles worst and PNG handles best.

Anything you will edit again. Every JPEG save loses a little more. Work in PNG, export to JPEG at the end.

The mistake that actually costs you

This is the one worth remembering, because it is the reason so many photos look bad and nobody knows why.

Repeated JPEG saving compounds. Open a JPEG, crop it, save. Open it again, adjust the brightness, save. Do that five or six times and the damage becomes visible: blotchy patches in skies, halos around edges, blocky squares in flat areas. Each save throws away a little more, and it never comes back.

The same thing happens invisibly when a photo goes through messaging apps. Every forward is another recompression. A photo that has been round WhatsApp four times is measurably worse than the one that left the camera, even though the pixel dimensions may be identical.

If a photo has already been through that, the damage is baked in, and it looks like this:

An AI image enhancer can rebuild a lot of what compression removed, because it can make an informed guess at what those blocks were meant to be. It is a repair, not an undo, so the real fix is to stop the damage happening: keep an original, edit from that, and export a fresh JPEG each time rather than resaving the same one.

What about WebP and AVIF?

Both are newer and both are genuinely better than JPEG at the same file size. WebP is supported everywhere that matters now, AVIF nearly everywhere.

The practical position: if you run a website, serve WebP or AVIF, because your pages will load faster for the same visual quality. If you are sending a file to a person, send JPEG or PNG, because those open anywhere without anyone having to think about it.

Quick reference

FAQ

Is PNG better quality than JPEG?

PNG is lossless, so it preserves the file exactly, while JPEG discards detail to save space. For photographs at a high quality setting the visible difference is usually nil and JPEG files are far smaller. For screenshots, text and logos the difference is obvious and PNG is clearly better.

Why does my logo have a white background when I save it as a JPEG?

JPEG cannot store transparency, so any transparent area is filled in, normally with white. Save logos as PNG to keep the background see through.

Does converting a JPEG to PNG improve the quality?

No. The detail JPEG discarded is already gone, and wrapping it in PNG just makes a larger file containing the same damage. Converting only helps going forward, by stopping further loss on subsequent saves.

Which format is best for printing?

PNG or TIFF if you are supplying the file to a printer, because nothing is lost. A high quality JPEG is usually fine for home printing and the difference is rarely visible on paper.

Format matters less than resolution here. Printers generally want around 300 pixels per inch at the finished size, so if your file is short of that an AI image upscaler will do more for the print than changing format will.

Why do my photos look worse after sending them on WhatsApp?

The app recompresses images to save data, and each pass through discards more detail. Sending the photo as a document attachment rather than as an image skips most of that and delivers the original.

Related guides

• How to fix pixelated photos
• How to restore old photos