Every article about image formats says the same thing: "use WebP for photos, PNG for transparency, SVG for logos." That's not wrong, but it's so simplified it ends up being useless. I've spent the past year building and maintaining this converter, which means I've seen what formats people actually struggle with. Here's a more honest version of that guide.
When I was building this tool, I had to make decisions about which conversions to support first. That forced me to actually understand the tradeoffs — not in a theoretical way, but in a "why does this 800KB PNG become 2MB when I convert it to JPG" kind of way. Some of what I found matched the conventional wisdom. Some of it didn't.
I also get a lot of questions through the contact page from people who are confused about which format to use. The same misunderstandings come up over and over. This article is my attempt to answer those questions once, properly.
JPG has been around since the early 90s and it's not going anywhere. For photographs — real-world scenes with lots of color variation, light, and texture — JPG still does a reasonable job at small file sizes. Your phone saves everything as JPG for a reason.
But there are two situations where JPG quietly destroys your images and most people don't notice until it's too late. First: screenshots and anything with text, flat colors, or sharp edges. JPG's compression algorithm was designed for photos, and it handles hard edges terribly — you get those fuzzy halos around text and blurry lines around buttons. Second: every time you re-save a JPG, it loses a little more quality. Open, edit, save, repeat five times and you'll start to see it degrade. Always keep an original in a lossless format (PNG or the original RAW) and export JPG only for the final version.
"I converted my PNG to JPG and the file got bigger — why?"
This happens when the original PNG was a screenshot or a graphic with flat colors. PNG compresses those extremely well. JPG's algorithm actually struggles with them and can produce a larger file. If your PNG is already small, there's often no point converting it to JPG — you'll either get a bigger file or a worse-looking one.
PNG uses lossless compression, meaning the file that comes out is a perfect copy of what went in, just smaller. For photographs that's usually not worth the tradeoff — PNG photos are large. But for anything with text, UI elements, diagrams, logos, or screenshots, PNG is the right call. The edges stay sharp, the colors stay exact.
The other reason to use PNG is transparency. If you need a logo that sits cleanly on different backgrounds, or a UI element without a white box around it, PNG's alpha channel support is what makes that possible. JPG simply cannot do this — it doesn't have the concept of a transparent pixel.
One thing that surprised me: PNG files can often be reduced by 30–50% just by running them through a proper optimizer, without any visible quality change. The default PNG that comes out of Photoshop or a screenshot tool is usually not well-compressed. Our converter applies this optimization automatically.
If someone asks me "what format should I use for images on my website," WebP is almost always my answer. It handles everything reasonably well — photos, graphics, transparency, even animation. And it's typically 25–35% smaller than the equivalent JPG or PNG.
Browser support has been essentially universal for a few years now. In 2026, worrying about WebP compatibility is like worrying about whether browsers support CSS. There are still some edge cases — certain older Android WebViews, some email clients — but for any normal website, you're fine.
The one place WebP doesn't shine is when you need to share images with people who might open them in desktop software like Photoshop, Preview, or the default Windows photo viewer. Older versions of those apps don't support WebP. For web delivery, it's excellent. For files people will download and edit, stick with JPG or PNG.
AVIF came out of video compression research and it shows — the compression is genuinely impressive, especially for photographs with smooth gradients and skin tones. In my testing, AVIF files are typically 40–50% smaller than equivalent JPGs for those kinds of images. WebP is closer to 25–35%.
So why isn't everyone using AVIF? Encoding speed. Converting an image to AVIF is significantly more CPU-intensive than converting to WebP. On a server processing thousands of images, that matters. In a browser, it can mean a multi-second wait for a single image. I've been working on integrating AVIF support into this converter but I'm still stress-testing the encoder — I'd rather take longer and ship something reliable.
For 2027, I expect AVIF to become the standard recommendation over WebP, as encoding tools get faster and browser adoption continues to grow. For now, WebP is the safer default for most people.
SVG is fundamentally different from the other formats here — it's not a grid of pixels, it's a set of drawing instructions. "Draw a circle at position X, fill it with this color." That means it scales to any size without losing quality, which makes it perfect for logos, icons, and illustrations.
SVG files are also often tiny — a simple icon might be 2KB as SVG versus 20KB as PNG. And because they're text-based, you can open them in a code editor, animate them with CSS, or modify colors without needing design software.
The limitation is that SVG is only for vector artwork. You can't save a photo as SVG — well, technically you can, but it becomes enormous and pointless. If someone sends you a logo as a JPG and asks you to convert it to SVG, what they probably actually want is a traced vector version. That's a different process — auto-tracing — and this converter doesn't do that (yet).
Rather than a comparison table, here's how I actually think about it:
I see a lot of articles focused entirely on format choice, but the format is only part of the equation. A poorly compressed WebP can easily be larger than a well-compressed JPG. Quality settings matter enormously — going from quality 100 to quality 80 on a WebP often cuts the file in half with no visible difference.
When I built this converter, I spent a lot of time calibrating the default quality settings. The goal was: output that looks identical to the original at a meaningful reduction in file size. I settled on different defaults for different formats based on what I actually saw in output comparisons. It's not a setting you should have to think about.
Indirectly, yes. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, and images are often the biggest contributor to page weight. Smaller images load faster, which improves Core Web Vitals scores. Whether that translates to meaningful ranking improvement depends on a lot of other factors, but it's one of the easiest wins available.
No. PNG still has its place — lossless compression, broad software compatibility, transparency support. WebP can do most of what PNG does, but you'd lose compatibility with editing software, and lossless WebP isn't always smaller than a well-optimized PNG anyway.
Keep your originals. Convert copies for web delivery. The number of times I've seen someone convert their only copy of a file to a lossy format and then regret it is not small. Originals in lossless format, web delivery in WebP.
My guess is AVIF slowly displaces WebP for photographs as encoding tools improve. SVG continues to grow for UI work. PNG stays around for lossless needs. JPG doesn't die — it just gets used less for new content.
If your situation doesn't fit neatly into any of the above, feel free to send me a message. Specific questions are always more interesting than general ones.