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By Fadhil Abdulla

PNG vs JPG vs WebP (and HEIC): Which Image Format Should You Use?

A practical guide to image formats — what each is good at, which to use for photos, logos and websites, and how to convert between them.

Editorial disclosure: Pyalm publishes and maintains the products and free tools discussed on this site. Regulatory statements are linked to primary sources where applicable. No independent professional review is claimed unless a reviewer is explicitly named.

Choosing the wrong image format makes pages slow, logos blurry or uploads fail. The rules are simple once you know what each format is designed for.

The formats at a glance

Format Compression Transparency Best for
JPG Lossy No Photos, anywhere that needs universal support
PNG Lossless Yes Logos, screenshots, graphics with text or sharp edges
WebP Lossy or lossless Yes Websites — 25–35% smaller than JPG at similar quality
AVIF Lossy or lossless Yes Websites where maximum compression matters
HEIC Lossy Yes iPhone photos (efficient but poorly supported elsewhere)
SVG Vector Yes Logos and icons that must scale to any size

Quick decision guide

  • A photo for email, WhatsApp or a portal? JPG.
  • A logo, icon or screenshot? PNG (or SVG if you have the vector).
  • Any image on your website? WebP — every modern browser supports it.
  • An iPhone photo that won't upload? Convert HEIC to JPG.
  • Need transparency? PNG or WebP. JPG fills transparent areas with a colour.

How to convert between formats

  1. Open the free Image Converter.
  2. Drop in one image or a batch — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP or HEIC.
  3. Choose JPG, PNG or WebP and a quality.
  4. Download individually or as a ZIP.

Lossy vs lossless

Lossy formats (JPG, lossy WebP) throw away detail the eye barely notices. At 75–85% quality, photos look identical and are a fraction of the size. Repeatedly re-saving a JPG degrades it, so keep originals and export once.

Lossless formats (PNG) keep every pixel. That's perfect for text and flat colours — and wasteful for photos, where a PNG can be 5–10× larger than a JPG.

A bonus: metadata removal

Converting through the canvas strips EXIF data, including the GPS location many phones embed in photos. That's a privacy win when posting images publicly.

Your images stay on your device

Pyalm's image tools process files with your browser's canvas. Nothing is uploaded — useful for ID photos, product shots before launch, and screenshots containing customer data.

Fast websites, without the manual work

Unoptimised images are the most common reason business websites load slowly — and slow pages lose both rankings and enquiries. Pyalm builds fast, SEO-ready websites in Next.js where every uploaded image is resized, converted to modern formats and lazy-loaded automatically.

Image Converter | Image Compressor | Image Resizer | Image Cropper | All free tools

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Try the free Image Converter

Heavy images are the number-one reason business websites load slowly. Pyalm builds fast, SEO-ready websites with images optimised automatically — so you don't have to do this by hand for every upload.

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