PNG to JPG: How to Convert Without Wrecking Your Image

The upload form caps at 2 MB and your PNG is 6. Or the print shop asked for JPG and won't budge. Or you're sitting on 400 screenshots eating a third of a gigabyte for no good reason.

PNG to JPG is almost always a file size decision, and for photographs it's a good one. A photo saved as PNG is a waste of bytes, sometimes five or six times larger than the JPG version of the same picture. But there are two things this conversion does that people don't find out about until after they've deleted the original.

The big one: transparency is destroyed

PNG can store see-through pixels. JPG cannot. There is no JPG setting for it, no workaround, no plugin. The format has no way to record "this pixel is invisible".

So when a transparent PNG becomes a JPG, every transparent pixel has to become something solid. Which color it becomes depends on the tool doing the work. Some fill white. Some fill black. It isn't a choice you get to revisit later, because by then the information is gone.

This is why a logo that floated cleanly on your website suddenly sits inside a hard rectangle. Before you use a converted file anywhere, open it at full size and look at the corners. Thirty seconds, saves a lot of embarrassment.

If you need a smaller file and the transparency has to survive, don't use JPG. Convert the PNG to WebP instead. Transparency is preserved and the file usually comes out smaller than the JPG would have been anyway.

The other one: you can't undo it

PNG is lossless. Every pixel it stores is exactly the pixel that went in, which is why PNG files are big. JPG is lossy. It throws away detail that the human eye is bad at noticing, then stores an approximation.

Once that detail is discarded, it's gone. Converting the JPG back to PNG later gives you a large file containing the damaged image. It restores nothing. Keep your PNG masters somewhere and convert copies.

How to convert PNG to JPG

1. Open the Image Converter.
2. Drop your PNG files in, or paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard with Ctrl+V.
3. Set the output format to JPG.
4. Quality starts at 80. For photographs, 80 to 85 is the sweet spot. For anything with text or hard edges in it, go to 92 and up.
5. Convert, check one file at full size, then download the batch as a ZIP.

Everything runs locally in your browser, so a folder of 300 screenshots converts as fast as your laptop can chew through them, with no upload queue and no file count limit.

JPG is bad at exactly what PNG is good at

This part gets skipped a lot. JPEG compression was designed in the late 1980s for photographs, and it assumes the image is made of gradual tonal shifts. Hard edges break that assumption.

Put a screenshot of a spreadsheet through it at quality 75 and every black number picks up a faint grey halo. Flat areas of one color turn slightly blotchy. Thin lines get fuzzy. It's called ringing, and PNG never does it because PNG stores the edge exactly as drawn.

So the rule is boring but reliable. Photographs to JPG, yes. Screenshots, logos, diagrams, and anything with text baked into it, no.

When you should skip this conversion

If the PNG has transparency, if it's a screenshot of text, if it's a logo or icon, or if you'll be editing it again later, JPG is the wrong destination. In most of those cases what you actually wanted was a smaller PNG, not a different format. The Image Compressor can usually cut a PNG by 60 to 80 percent through color reduction while keeping transparency and hard edges intact. Our write up on how PNG compression works explains why that gets you further than you'd expect.