Format Converter

Pixels survive. Almost everything else is negotiable.

Transparency is the one that catches people. PNG, WebP and GIF have an alpha channel; JPEG and BMP do not. Convert a logo with a transparent background to JPEG and the transparent areas become solid - white here, because that is what gets painted underneath before encoding. There is no way to recover the alpha channel afterwards.

Colour profiles and metadata generally do not survive a canvas round trip. EXIF data - camera model, exposure, GPS coordinates, orientation - is read to decode the image correctly and then not written back out. That is a privacy improvement more often than it is a loss, but if you needed the capture date embedded in the file, note that it will be gone.

Animation does not survive either. An animated GIF converted here becomes a single still frame.

This is the single most common misunderstanding about format conversion. Converting a JPEG to PNG produces a lossless file, and people reasonably assume that means better quality. It does not. It means the compression artefacts that were already baked into the JPEG are now preserved perfectly and forever.

The pixels handed to the PNG encoder are the pixels the JPEG decoder produced, blocking and colour fringing included. You end up with a considerably larger file containing exactly the same visual information. The only thing you have gained is that further edits will not add more loss.

Which is a real reason to do it, incidentally. If you are about to make several rounds of edits to a photo, converting to PNG or lossless WebP first stops each save from compounding the damage. Convert back to JPEG once at the end.

The reverse direction is the one that costs you. JPEG to JPEG, or PNG to JPEG, discards detail permanently. Do it deliberately, at the end of your workflow, not casually in the middle.

PNG for anything with sharp edges, flat colour or transparency: screenshots, logos, diagrams, UI mockups. It is lossless and it is a bad choice for photographs, where it will produce files several times larger than JPEG for no visible benefit.

JPEG for photographs, and for any upload form that inspects the file extension. It is the format with genuinely universal support and it will still be accepted everywhere in a decade.

WebP when you control the destination. It handles both lossy and lossless, supports transparency, and typically reaches a given file size at better quality than JPEG. Browser support is broad now. Form and desktop-software support is not, which is the whole reason to be careful with it.

GIF is worth choosing only for legacy compatibility. It is limited to 256 colours per frame, so photographs come out visibly banded, and file sizes are poor. If you want animation, a short muted MP4 or an animated WebP beats it on every axis.

BMP is uncompressed. Files are enormous. The only good reason to produce one is that some specific old piece of software demands it.

The SVG option wraps the raster image inside an SVG document. It is useful when a system insists on the .svg extension, but it is a container, not a tracing - the image inside is still made of the same pixels and will not scale cleanly.

Because the work happens locally, the set of formats that can be decoded depends on your browser rather than on this site.

Common inputs - JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP - are decoded everywhere. AVIF is decoded by current versions of most browsers. HEIC, the format an iPhone produces by default, is the awkward one: Safari decodes it, most other browsers historically do not, so a .heic file may simply fail to load outside Safari. The most reliable fix is on the phone - Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible, which makes the camera capture JPEG instead.

Encoding has its own limits. JPEG, PNG and WebP encoding is well supported. Some browsers will silently fall back to PNG when asked for a format they cannot encode, which shows up as an unexpectedly large output file. If the size looks wrong, that is usually why.