Convert JPG to PNG
Convert JPG photos to PNG in your browser. Useful for editing workflows and for tools that only accept PNG, but it’ll not remove artefacts.
Drop JPG files here or paste from the clipboard.
Your files are processed on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
What actually changes
The JPG is decoded into pixels and those pixels are written out losslessly, so from this point on the image stops degrading each time it is saved. The file gets substantially larger, because PNG has to describe photographic noise it can’t compress. An alpha channel becomes available, though the image arrives fully opaque; nothing in a JPG can tell PNG which parts should be transparent.
| JPG | PNG | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossy | Lossless |
| Transparency | No | Yes |
| Format can be animated | No | No |
It can’t undo JPEG compression
This is the misunderstanding worth naming plainly. Converting a JPG to PNG preserves exactly what is in the file now, including every compression artefact already baked into it. The blocking around edges, the banding in skies and the smeared fine detail are all part of the image at this point and a lossless format will faithfully preserve them at ten times the file size. PNG stops further damage; it doesn’t repair earlier damage.
Generation loss and why it stops here
Every time a JPG is opened, altered and saved, the encoder compresses an image that already contains compression artefacts and it faithfully preserves those artefacts while adding new ones. Five rounds of this on the same file is clearly visible. Converting to PNG puts a stop to it, because a lossless format saves the same pixels every time.
This is the one solid argument for the conversion. It isn’t about improving the file, it is about freezing it before an editing session rather than after.
What PNG is genuinely good at
Flat colour, sharp edges, text, transparency and screenshots. If your JPG happens to be a screenshot that someone unhelpfully saved as JPG, converting to PNG won’t restore the crispness, but it’ll stop the next save from making it worse.
A smaller alternative
If the reason for converting is an editing workflow rather than a strict format requirement, WebP in lossless mode does the same job as PNG and produces a smaller file. The trade-off is support: PNG works in everything ever written, WebP works in everything current.
Common questions
Will converting to PNG improve the image quality?
No. The artefacts in a JPG are already part of the picture and PNG stores them perfectly rather than removing them. What you gain is that no further quality is lost on subsequent saves, which is genuinely useful if the file is about to be edited several times.
Why is the PNG so much larger?
Because it is lossless and photographs are hard to compress losslessly. Sensor noise makes every pixel slightly unpredictable and unpredictable data doesn’t compress. Expect somewhere between five and ten times the size of the JPG, occasionally more.
Can I get a transparent background this way?
Not automatically. PNG supports transparency but the JPG has none to carry over, so the result is fully opaque. Removing a background means deciding which pixels should disappear, which is an editing job rather than a conversion.
When is this conversion actually the right move?
When something downstream demands PNG, which several design tools, some print workflows and a number of upload forms still do. And when a photo is about to go through repeated edit-and-save cycles, where working in a lossless format until the final export avoids compounding compression damage.