JPG vs PNG: Which Format Should You Actually Use?

This is one of those questions that has a genuinely simple answer once you know the one fact that decides it: does the image need a transparent background or hard, flat-color edges (text, logos, line art)? If yes, PNG. If it's a photo with no transparency, JPG. Everything else in this decision is a downstream consequence of that single distinction.

Why JPG is smaller for photos

JPG uses lossy compression tuned for photographic detail — gradients, soft transitions, lots of subtly different colors — and it can shrink a photo to a fraction of its raw size with a quality loss that's invisible at normal viewing sizes. That compression works by smoothing out fine detail the eye won't miss in a photo, which is exactly the wrong tradeoff for flat graphics.

Why PNG wins for logos, text, and screenshots

PNG uses lossless compression, so hard edges — the edge of a letter, a sharp line in a logo — stay perfectly crisp instead of getting the soft, slightly blurry halo that JPG compression puts around high-contrast edges. Save a screenshot or a logo as JPG and you'll often see faint colored fringing around text; that's compression artifacting, and PNG doesn't have it.

The transparency question

JPG has no concept of transparency at all — if you convert a transparent PNG to JPG, the transparent areas get filled with a solid color (usually white or black) instead of showing whatever's behind them. If your background-removed product photo needs to sit on top of a colored background or another image later, it has to stay PNG until that final compositing step.

File size in practice

For a typical product photo, JPG at a sensible quality setting is usually 5-10x smaller than the same image saved as PNG, because PNG has to losslessly store every pixel of a gradient sky or a soft shadow that JPG can approximate for almost no visible difference. That's why product photos on Etsy and social media are almost always JPG, while the logo overlay or watermark on top of them is PNG.

The one thing that changes the answer

If you're printing a design (not photographing it) — a T-shirt graphic, a DTF transfer, an embroidery preview — PNG is usually still the right choice for the working file even without transparency, because print production files get edited, resized, and re-exported multiple times, and lossless format avoids compounding compression damage across those steps. Convert to JPG only at the very final export if the destination requires it.