PNG or JPG? How to pick the right format every time

You send a friend a vacation photo and it's 18 MB. You save a screenshot of an invoice and the numbers look smudged. Neither is your camera's or monitor's fault — you just picked the wrong format.

JPG is for photos

JPG is lossy. It throws away detail your eyes won't miss, which keeps files small. A 12 MP phone photo is around 3 MB as JPG and easily 15–20 MB as PNG. Quality 80 is the sweet spot: you won't see the difference from 100, but the file is roughly half the size.

One catch: every re-save of a JPG loses a little more quality. Always edit from the original, not a copy that's been saved three times.

PNG is for text, logos and transparency

PNG is lossless — every pixel stays exactly as it was. That makes it perfect for screenshots, charts, logos and anything with sharp edges. Text in a JPG gets fuzzy halos (compression artifacts); in PNG it stays crisp. And only PNG supports a transparent background, so a JPG logo always comes with a white box.

The five-second rule

- Photo, selfie, product shot → JPG

- Screenshot, chart, logo, icon → PNG

- Publishing on the web? → try WebP, usually 25–35% smaller

Stuck with the wrong one? FileTools converts PNG to JPG (and back) right in your browser, nothing to install. And if you make videos, TubeVoice can dub them into other languages.