JPG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, SVG, GIF and TIFF compared honestly: what each one is genuinely good at, where it fails, and how to decide in about five seconds.
Is it a logo or an icon made of shapes? Use SVG. It stays sharp at any size and the file is tiny.
Does it need a transparent background? Use PNG, or WEBP if it is going on a website.
Is it a photograph for a website? Use WEBP. It is 25 to 35 percent smaller than JPG at the same quality.
Is it a photograph going anywhere else — email, a form, social media, a print shop? Use JPG. Everything accepts it.
Is it a screenshot containing text? Use PNG. JPG compression makes small lettering fuzzy.
The format the entire web ran on for thirty years, and still the right answer for photographs. It discards detail the eye is least likely to notice, which produces very small files from complex images.
Lossless, so nothing is thrown away, and it supports full transparency. That makes it right for logos, icons, screenshots and anything with sharp edges or flat colour, and wrong for photographs.
Google's replacement for both JPG and PNG. It does lossy and lossless, supports transparency and animation, and is typically 25 to 35 percent smaller than the equivalent JPEG at the same visual quality.
The newest widely supported format, built on the AV1 video codec. It compresses substantially better than WebP, particularly at low quality, but encoding is slow and support is not yet universal.
What iPhones have shot by default since iOS 11. Roughly half the size of JPEG at the same quality, but poorly supported outside Apple devices, which is why people constantly need to convert it.
Not pixels at all, but instructions for drawing shapes. That means it stays perfectly sharp at any size and the file is usually tiny. Useless for photographs, essential for logos and interface icons.
Obsolete for almost everything. Limited to 256 colours, produces large files, and animated WebP or a short video does the same job far better. It survives purely because everything supports it.
A professional archival and print format. Lossless, supports layers and colour profiles, and produces very large files. Not supported by browsers, so it never appears on the web.
| Format | Compression | Transparency | Support | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JPG | Lossy | No | Universal | Photographs, smallest practical files |
| PNG | Lossless | Yes | Universal | Logos, screenshots, sharp edges |
| WEBP | Both | Yes | Modern browsers | The default choice for websites |
| AVIF | Both | Yes | Most modern | Best compression, needs a fallback |
| HEIC | Lossy | Yes | Apple only | iPhone storage, convert before sharing |
| SVG | Vector | Yes | Universal | Logos and icons at any size |
| GIF | Lossless | Binary | Universal | Legacy animation only |
| TIFF | Lossless | Yes | None | Print, archiving, professional masters |
Lossy compression permanently discards image data, choosing detail the human eye is least sensitive to. JPEG does this extremely well on photographs, where the eye is forgiving of small colour variations. Every time you re-save a lossy file it degrades further, which is why editing a JPG repeatedly slowly destroys it.
Lossless compression stores the image exactly, finding patterns to describe the data more efficiently. Nothing is lost and you can re-save endlessly, but files are much larger for photographs because a photograph has few repeating patterns to exploit. Read more on lossy and lossless compression.
Apple switched to HEIC in 2017 because it stores the same quality in roughly half the space of JPEG, which matters when a phone holds thousands of photos. The problem is support: Windows, most websites, older Android phones and many upload forms cannot read it.
You have two options. Change the camera setting to Most Compatible, which shoots JPEG directly at the cost of storage space, or keep shooting HEIC and convert to JPG when you need to share something.
AVIF genuinely compresses better than WebP, sometimes dramatically at low quality settings. Support now covers most modern browsers, but not all of them, and encoding is noticeably slower.
The practical answer for most sites is WebP with a JPG fallback, which is simpler and already delivers most of the benefit. AVIF is worth the extra complexity when you serve a lot of large images and bandwidth is a real cost.
Saving a photograph as PNG. It happens constantly because PNG sounds like the higher quality option, and technically it is lossless. But a photograph saved as PNG is often five to ten times larger than the same image as a well-compressed JPG, with no visible difference. PNG is lossless in a way that only helps images with flat colour and sharp edges.
Choosing an image format comes down to three questions: is the image a photograph or a graphic, does it need transparency, and where is it going. Everything else is detail. Photographs compress well with lossy formats like JPG and WEBP; graphics with flat colour and sharp edges need lossless formats like PNG, or vector SVG when the image is made of shapes rather than pixels.
For websites specifically, WebP has become the sensible default. It handles both lossy and lossless compression, supports transparency and animation, works in every modern browser, and produces files roughly a quarter to a third smaller than the equivalent JPEG. That difference is meaningful for page speed and Core Web Vitals.
PNG remains essential, but for a narrower set of cases than most people assume: logos, icons, screenshots containing text, and any image that needs a genuinely transparent background. Using PNG for photographs is the single most common formatting mistake, producing files many times larger with no visible benefit.
HEIC is worth understanding because iPhones shoot it by default. It is an efficient format that saves real storage space, but its support outside Apple devices is poor enough that converting to JPG before sharing is usually necessary. AVIF sits at the other end: technically superior compression, growing support, but not yet the simple default.
Use the converter and compressor to move between any of these formats in batches, the image size guide for the dimensions each platform expects, and the favicon generator when you need one logo turned into every icon size a website requires.