JPG to PNG Converter

Good to know

• Phone photos stay the right way up: the rotation stored in the file is applied before converting.
• JPG has no transparency, so converting to JPG fills transparent areas with white. PNG and WebP keep transparency.
• Converting re-encodes the picture, so camera metadata (EXIF: date, camera settings, GPS location) is not copied to the new file. That also means a converted photo no longer reveals where it was taken. To see what a photo carries first, open it in the EXIF viewer.
• Large photos, 48 MP and up, take a few seconds each. If a browser cannot hold one at full size, it is saved at the largest size that browser allows and labelled so in the list.

JPG and PNG are built for different jobs

JPG is the photographer’s delivery format: small files, accepted everywhere, at the cost of lossy compression that discards a little detail each time the file is saved. PNG is lossless: what goes in is exactly what comes out, however often you save it, and it can hold transparency.

When to convert JPG to PNG

Convert when a platform or a design tool requires PNG, or when you are going to edit a photo in several rounds and want each save to stay lossless. A PNG is also the usual starting point when a background is going to be removed later, because the finished cut-out has to be saved in a format that can be transparent.

What converting does and does not do

Converting does not improve the photo: any compression artefacts already in the JPG stay in the PNG, pixel for pixel. It does not make the background transparent either; that needs a cut-out. Expect the PNG to be several times larger than the JPG. Camera metadata is not copied.