A practical guide to choosing between JPG, PNG and PDF for photos, screenshots, scans, forms and printing, with advice on quality, file size and conversion.
You have a file and a task: send it, upload it, print it, post it. One site wants a JPG, another asks for a PDF, a third says “PNG with a transparent background”. These three formats do different jobs. Once you know what each one is good at, you can pick the right one quickly and convert between them without losing anything you cared about.
What it is: a format for photographs that makes files small by discarding detail that the eye barely notices. This is called lossy compression: the more you compress, the smaller the file and the lower the quality.
What it is: a format that keeps every pixel exactly as it was (lossless). Files are larger than a JPG of the same photo, but sharp edges stay sharp.
What it is: a document format. A PDF can hold text, pictures and several pages in one file, and it looks the same on every device. It is not an image format in itself; it is a container.
Use Image to PDF to put one or many JPG or PNG pictures into a PDF. You can reorder pages, crop, rotate and choose a file size mode. See the JPG to PDF guide for the details.
Use PDF to Image to turn each page into a JPG or PNG. Pick JPG for small files that are easy to share, PNG for the sharpest text, and choose a resolution: Standard, High or Ultra. You can download the pages one by one or all together as a ZIP. The PDF to JPG and PNG guide covers when to choose each setting.
Every time you save a JPG, it is recompressed and a little more detail is lost. Converting a JPG into a PNG does not bring the lost detail back; it only stores the damage losslessly. If you can, keep one original and make each copy from it.
For a phone photo of a page, a JPG is often under 1 MB after sensible compression, while the same page as a PNG can be several megabytes. A screenshot of text, though, can be smaller as a PNG than as a JPG, and it will look sharper. That is why there is no single best format: the content of the picture decides.
For documents, the sizes you see depend on resolution and compression. If a PDF is too large to send, see how to make a PDF smaller. If you want to understand resolution and print sizes, the guide to image resolution and DPI explains how many pixels a page needs.
JPG for photos, PNG for sharp graphics and transparency, PDF for documents. Pick the format by what the picture contains and where it is going, and keep an original so you never have to compress a file twice.
PNG is lossless, so it keeps every pixel exactly, which suits text, line art and screenshots. JPG is lossy and smaller, which suits photos. Neither is better for everything.
JPG compression works well for smooth photographs but creates fuzzy edges around sharp text and lines, especially at low quality. Use PNG for screenshots and diagrams.
Yes. Placing a picture in a PDF does not have to change the picture. Quality is decided by the compression setting you choose when you build the PDF.
Read the form. Most portals say whether they accept PDF, JPG or both and give a maximum size. When they allow either, a single PDF is easiest for multi-page documents.