PNG to JPG Converter

How to convert PNG to JPG (10 seconds)

PNG vs JPG and why the file size gap is real

PNG stores every pixel exactly. No compression, no data loss. A screenshot of your desktop at 1920x1080 can easily be 3 to 5 megabytes as PNG. The same file as JPG at 85% quality is usually under 500 kilobytes. Same image, ten times smaller. That is the whole pitch.

How does it get that small? JPG compression works by grouping similar colors together and rounding them. Your eye cannot tell the difference between two nearby shades of blue in a sky, so JPG treats them as one. It does this across the whole image and removes a ton of redundant data. The result looks the same to you but takes up a fraction of the space.

The one thing JPG cannot do is transparency. That checkerboard pattern you see in image editors for transparent areas? JPG has no way to represent that. When you convert a transparent PNG to JPG, those areas become white. If transparency matters to you, do not convert to JPG. Use WebP instead, which handles both transparency and good compression.

Quality setting: what the numbers actually mean

The quality slider goes from 1 to 100. At 100 you are barely compressing anything and the file is almost as big as the PNG. At 1 the image looks like it was faxed in 1995. The useful range for most people is 70 to 90.

For photos and images with lots of gradients and natural colors, 80 to 85 is the sweet spot. File size drops dramatically and the image looks great. For screenshots or images with text and sharp edges, push it to 90 or above. JPG compression creates little blocky artifacts around sharp edges at lower quality settings, and text is the worst victim of that effect.

Social media platforms recompress your images anyway when you upload them. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn all run their own compression pass. So uploading at 100% quality is kind of pointless since they will compress it regardless. Uploading at 85% is fine and saves upload time too.

Measured: how much smaller JPG gets

We measured this on twelve of the illustrations used on this site. Each one was saved as a PNG, then as a JPEG at three quality settings.

At quality 90 the JPEGs came to about a fifth of the PNG size, with no difference you would notice on these images. Going from 90 down to 80 saved comparatively little extra, which is typical: most of the saving comes from switching format, not from pushing quality down.

Where JPG is the wrong choice

Those numbers come from illustrations with smooth shading, which is where JPEG shines. It behaves differently on screenshots of text, logos, line drawings and flat blocks of colour. JPEG works on small blocks of the image and struggles with hard edges, so it leaves faint ripples and smudges around letters and lines.

For that kind of image, PNG or lossless WebP is the better choice. If you must use JPG, keep the quality at 90 or above, which reduces the ripples without removing them entirely.

Transparency needs a decision

JPEG has no transparency. Any transparent area in the PNG is filled with white during conversion. That is fine for a photo on a white page, and wrong for a logo that has to sit on a coloured background, where the white box around it will show. Keep logos with transparency as PNG or WebP.

Frequently asked questions