JPG, PNG, or WebP: choosing the right image format
How the three common web image formats differ, which one to export, and when converting between them helps or hurts.
Most image problems are format problems: a logo saved as JPEG looks fuzzy, a photo saved as PNG is enormous, or a transparent icon turns into a black square when it is converted carelessly. Understanding what each format is good at makes those problems disappear.
JPEG: small photos, permanently compressed
JPEG is lossy. It discards detail that the human eye is less likely to notice, and the discarded detail is gone forever. For photographs it is still an excellent trade: small files that look fine. For sharp edges, text, and screenshots it is a poor fit, because compression artifacts appear around high-contrast edges. JPEG has no transparency support.
PNG: lossless, transparent, larger
PNG stores pixels losslessly and supports an alpha channel, which makes it the right choice for interface graphics, logos, charts, and anything with transparency or crisp edges. The cost is size: photographic content saved as PNG can be several times larger than the equivalent JPEG.
WebP: efficient, flexible, widely supported
WebP supports both lossy and lossless modes plus transparency, and it usually beats JPEG and PNG at similar visual quality. Every current major browser renders it. If you need one modern format for both photos and graphics, WebP is the pragmatic default.
Converting between formats
- JPG to PNG avoids another lossy step, but it cannot restore detail JPEG already discarded.
- PNG to JPG requires a background color, because JPEG cannot store transparency.
- PNG to WebP and JPG to WebP usually reduce size while keeping transparency where the source had it.
- Compress image re-encodes at a quality you choose and reports the real size change.
Details that surprise people
Phones store orientation in EXIF metadata rather than rotating pixels. littlekit tools apply EXIF orientation before editing, so the preview matches reality. Re-encoding removes metadata and color profiles, which is often good for privacy but slightly changes color on very high-bit-depth images. Animated images, SVG, HEIC, AVIF, and CMYK JPEG are not supported.
If the goal is privacy rather than size, Remove image metadata strips EXIF, GPS, and comments deliberately, and Resize image handles the everyday "make this fit the upload limit" case.