PRACTICAL GUIDE
JPG vs PNG vs WebP: Which Image Format Should You Use?
The real difference is what each format was built to compress. Once you know that, the choice makes itself for photos, screenshots, logos and the web.
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The difference is what each one was built for
JPG assumes a photograph. Its compression throws away the fine detail the eye is worst at noticing, which works beautifully on skin, sky and foliage and badly on a hard black line against white.
PNG assumes a graphic. It compresses by finding exact repetition, so large areas of identical colour collapse to almost nothing while a photograph, where hardly any two pixels match, barely compresses at all. Nothing is discarded, which is why a PNG photo is enormous.
WebP was built later and does both, with a lossy mode for photographs and a lossless mode for graphics, plus transparency in either.
Use JPG for photographs
It is the safest format in existence: every device, every application, every upload form. For a photograph it produces small files that look right, and the artefacts stay hidden inside detail. It cannot do transparency, and every time you save one you lose a little more, so it is a delivery format rather than a working one.
Use PNG for anything with sharp edges
Screenshots, logos, diagrams, interface elements, anything containing text. PNG keeps the boundary between two colours exactly where it was, while JPG smears it into a halo that reads as blurriness at small sizes. PNG also supports full transparency, including soft edges, which is why logos live in it.
Use WebP when the destination is a browser
It is smaller than JPG for photographs and smaller than PNG for graphics, supports transparency, and every current browser reads it. The honest limitation is outside the browser: some desktop applications, older phones and a few upload forms still refuse it, so it is the right delivery format for a website and the wrong one for an email attachment to someone you do not know.
Converting does not undo what was already lost
Turning a heavily compressed JPG into a PNG produces a large file that preserves the compression artefacts perfectly. Conversion changes the container, not the history. If you have the original, convert from that; if you do not, convert once and accept the file you have rather than cycling it through formats.
Frequently asked questions
Is WebP always smaller?
For photographs and for graphics it usually is, often by a fifth to a third against JPG at comparable quality. Not always: a very small icon or an image that was already aggressively compressed can come out about the same or slightly larger, because the savings depend on what is in the picture.
Does converting PNG to JPG lose quality?
Yes, twice over. JPG compression is lossy, so detail goes; and transparency is not supported, so anything transparent has to be filled with a colour, normally white. Convert a logo to JPG and you get a white rectangle behind it that you cannot remove afterwards.
What about GIF?
For still images there is no reason to use it: 256 colours and worse compression than PNG. Its remaining niche is short animation, and even there a video file or an animated WebP is smaller and looks better.
Which format keeps my photo's metadata?
All three can carry EXIF, though whether it survives depends on the tool rather than the format. Anything that re-encodes an image through a browser canvas, as these tools do, writes out only pixels, so the metadata is left behind as a side effect of the conversion.