How to use it
- Add your PNG files.
- Set the quality. 85 to 90% suits photos. For screenshots with small text, go higher.
- If your PNGs have transparent parts, choose the fill colour, then download.
When this saves a lot of space, and when it does not
PNG is lossless, which is ideal for flat graphics and wasteful for photographs. A photo saved as PNG can easily be five to ten times bigger than a JPG that looks the same, so converting those is an easy win. Photos exported from editing apps, phone screenshots of photos and scanned pictures are the usual suspects.
Screenshots of apps and documents are a different story. They are mostly flat colour and sharp text, which PNG compresses very well and JPG handles badly: you get faint grey speckles around letters, called ringing. If a screenshot needs to be smaller, try the PNG compressor first and compare.
Transparency needs a decision
JPG cannot store transparency. Anything see-through in the PNG has to become a solid colour, and you get to choose which one. White matches most documents and web pages. If the image will sit on a coloured background, pick that colour so the edges blend in rather than showing a pale halo. There is more on why this goes wrong elsewhere in our note on transparency.
PNG and JPG compared
| PNG | JPG | |
|---|---|---|
| First released | 1996 | 1992 |
| Compression | Lossless | Lossy |
| Transparency | Yes, including soft edges | No |
| Animation or pages | Only as APNG, rarely used | No |
| Best for | Screenshots, graphics, text and transparency | Photos for sharing, email and print |
| Support | Universal | Universal |
Questions people ask
What quality should I use for PNG to JPG?
For photographs, 85 to 90% is the usual sweet spot. Below about 75% you start to see blockiness in skies and skin. For images with text, 92 to 95% keeps lettering clean.
Why did my logo get a white box around it?
The logo had a transparent background, and JPG cannot be transparent, so the empty area was filled with the background colour. Keep logos as PNG, or WebP if you need them smaller.
Will converting back to PNG restore the quality?
No. Once JPG compression has removed detail, converting back just stores the reduced version losslessly. Keep your original PNG if you might need it.