Image Format Guide — When to Use JPG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, and More

The universal photo format. JPG uses lossy compression to make photographs small, and it opens on every device, browser, printer, and email client ever made. It's a poor choice for graphics with sharp edges or text, and it has no transparency.

Best for: Photographs, email attachments, and anywhere you need a file that just works everywhere.

The lossless format for graphics. PNG keeps every pixel exact and supports full transparency, which makes it ideal for screenshots, logos, UI, and anything with sharp text or lines. Photographs stored as PNG are typically three to five times larger than the same image as JPG.

Best for: Screenshots, logos, icons, diagrams, and any image that needs a transparent background.

Google's modern web format. WebP produces files roughly 25–35% smaller than JPG at the same visual quality and supports both transparency and animation. It's now supported in every major browser, but many desktop apps, email clients, and print workflows still can't open it.

Best for: Faster-loading website images — a modern drop-in for both JPG photos and PNG graphics.

The next-generation web format, built on the AV1 video codec. AVIF usually beats both JPG and WebP on file size at matched quality and handles HDR and wide color gamut. Encoding is slower, and outside modern browsers support is still thin — treat it as a web-only format with a JPG or WebP fallback.

Best for: The smallest possible web images, shipped inside a <picture> element with fallbacks.

The format your iPhone shoots by default since iOS 11. HEIC stores photos at roughly half the size of JPG at similar quality, but support is largely limited to Apple devices — Windows, Android, older email clients, and many websites can't open it. Convert to JPG or PNG before sharing outside the Apple world.

Best for: Space-efficient photo storage on iPhones and Macs (convert before you share).

The uncompressed Windows bitmap. BMP stores raw pixel data with no compression, so files are large but bit-for-bit exact and trivially simple to read. It survives mostly in legacy Windows software and embedded systems that expect raw bitmaps.

Best for: Legacy Windows apps and tools that require a plain, uncompressed bitmap.

The original web animation format. GIF supports short looping animations and 1-bit transparency, but it's capped at 256 colors per frame, so photographs look banded and files are heavy. For anything but tiny, low-color loops, WebP, AVIF, or MP4 are smaller and sharper.

Best for: Short, low-color looping animations and simple flat graphics.

The professional print and archive format. TIFF is lossless, supports CMYK and 16-bit color, and is accepted by every print shop and imaging archive. Files are large — often tens of megabytes — which is the price of carrying every pixel uncompressed.

Best for: Print masters and long-term archival storage where fidelity beats file size.

The vector format. SVG stores shapes as mathematical paths rather than pixels, so true SVGs stay razor-sharp at any size and are tiny for simple graphics. Converting a photo into SVG doesn't magically vectorize it — most tools just embed the pixels inside an SVG wrapper — so reach for SVG only when the artwork is genuinely vector.

Best for: Logos, icons, and line art that must scale cleanly from a favicon to a billboard.