Convert PNG to JPG

PNG and JPG, and why you would swap one for the other

PNG stores an image exactly. Nothing is approximated, every pixel comes back the way it went in, and it can store transparency, which is why logos, icons, screenshots and anything with text or flat colour belong in PNG. The cost is size.

JPG stores an image approximately. It discards detail the eye is bad at noticing, which makes photographs dramatically smaller at a quality most people cannot tell from the original. The cost is that the discarded detail is gone for good, and that it has no transparency at all.

So the swap is worth it when the image is a photograph, when something will not accept a PNG, or when a file has to be smaller for an upload limit or an email. It is a bad trade for a logo, a diagram, a screenshot of text, or anything you will edit again afterwards.

How to convert a PNG to JPG

• Choose your PNG. Nothing is uploaded, so nothing happens on a server and there is nothing to wait for.
• Pick what colour goes behind any transparent areas. White by default.
• Set the quality if you care; the default suits photographs.
• Press convert. You get the before and after side by side, with both file sizes.
• Download. The file keeps its name with a .jpg extension.

What happens to transparency

It is filled in, because a JPG has nowhere to put it. Every transparent or part transparent pixel is composited onto the background colour you chose before the JPG is written.

This is the single thing that most often goes wrong elsewhere. A converter that hands the transparent pixels straight to a JPG encoder gets black, because a blank canvas is transparent black and the encoder keeps the colour while dropping the transparency. That is where the black boxes behind converted logos come from. This tool paints the background first and the image second, which is why you will not see it, and the preview above shows you the flattened result before you download anything.

File size, and why it sometimes goes up

Converting to JPG usually makes a photograph much smaller. It is not a guarantee, and this page will not pretend it is. PNG compresses flat colour extremely well, so a logo, a chart or a screenshot of a document can come out of a JPG encoder larger than it went in, sometimes much larger. Both sizes are shown above so you can see which case you are in before you download.

If the JPG is bigger, the honest answer is usually to keep the PNG.

Metadata

The JPG comes out clean. Re-encoding through a canvas keeps the pixels and nothing else, so any text chunks, colour profiles, creation dates or editing history in the PNG are not carried across. For most people that is a small privacy win. If you specifically need an embedded colour profile preserved, this is not the tool for it.

PNGs do not normally carry GPS or camera EXIF the way photographs straight off a phone do, but if yours does, it does not survive either.

Common questions

If what you actually need is better photos

A converter changes a file format. If the problem is the picture rather than the format, that is the rest of what CMeIn does: realistic photos of you, built from a handful of ordinary phone photos, in places you have not been. This converter stays free either way.