HEIC vs JPG vs PNG vs WEBP: which format should you use?

Four formats cover almost every photo you will ever handle. They differ on three axes: how small the file gets, whether quality is lost, and where the file can actually be opened. Here is the honest version, without favorites.

The four in one table

HEIC: the efficient one

HEIC borrows its compression from the HEVC video codec and stores photos at roughly half the size of JPG with support for 10-bit color and depth data. It is a great storage format — which is exactly how Apple uses it — but a poor exchange format, because Windows, many websites and older devices do not accept it.

JPG: the universal one

Thirty years old and still the only photo format that works literally everywhere: every browser, OS, e-mail client, government portal and digital photo frame. Its lossy compression is visible at low quality settings (blocky artifacts around edges), but at 85%+ it is excellent for photographs. It cannot do transparency and recompressing it repeatedly degrades quality, so keep an original.

PNG: the exact one

PNG reproduces every pixel exactly and supports transparency, which makes it the right choice for screenshots, diagrams, logos and images containing text. The same exactness makes it the wrong choice for photographs: photographic noise barely compresses losslessly, so files balloon.

WEBP: the web one

Google's format compresses photos 25–35% smaller than JPG at comparable quality and also has a lossless mode and transparency. Every modern browser displays it, which is why page-speed tools recommend it for websites. Outside the browser its support is weaker: some e-mail clients, office suites and upload forms still reject it.

Decision table