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JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF or HEIC? Picking the right image format

The converter above reads JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF, SVG, ICO and HEIC, and saves PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, BMP or ICO. The format you choose decides whether transparency survives, how big the file gets and whether the other side can open it, so it pays to know the differences.

A closer look

JPG uses lossy compression that drops detail the eye barely notices, so photos stay small and open almost anywhere. It has no transparency, so this converter fills transparent areas with white, and screenshots full of text tend to get smudgy edges. PNG is lossless: text and logos stay crisp and transparency is kept, but a photo saved as PNG is commonly several times larger than as JPG. WebP supports lossy and lossless compression plus transparency, is usually smaller than JPG at similar quality, and opens in every current major browser, though some older programs and upload forms still reject it. AVIF often gets smaller still, but encoding is heavy, so a large photo can take tens of seconds, and older software may not open it. HEIC, the iPhone’s default format, often will not open on Windows, in Chrome or on many websites, so here it is accepted as input only.

GIF holds at most 256 colors per frame and each pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque; with an animated GIF, only the first frame is converted. BMP is uncompressed: the 24-bit BMP made here takes roughly width × height × 3 bytes, so a 4000 × 3000 photo comes to about 36 million bytes. ICO is made as a single square image of up to 256 × 256 pixels, with non-square pictures centered on a transparent background. SVG is turned into pixels at the size defined in the file. Compression loss happens only when saving to JPG, WebP or AVIF, and it builds up each time an image is saved again; turning a JPG into a PNG does not bring lost detail back, it just makes a bigger file. Every result is a freshly drawn image, so EXIF data such as GPS location and capture time is not carried over.

How to use it

• Drag images onto the drop area or press Choose files. You can mix formats and add many at once; the first HEIC conversion loads a decoding module.
• Pick a format in Convert to. Good starting points: JPG for photos that must open anywhere, PNG for transparency and text, WebP or AVIF for the web, ICO for a favicon.
• Max width only ever shrinks an image and is ignored for ICO. Quality (92% by default) applies to JPG, WebP and AVIF only.
• Press Convert, then use Save or Download all, or Save all as ZIP once there are two or more files. A file that fails stays in the list with the reason while the rest carry on.

When it helps

Common snags

Tip Always convert from the original. Bouncing an image through lossy formats, say JPG to WebP and back to JPG, shaves off a little quality at every step.