Convert JPG to PNG

What this conversion does not do

The single most common reason people convert JPG to PNG is to improve quality. That is not how it works, and it is worth being blunt about it.

JPG is a lossy format. When the file was first saved, detail was permanently discarded — fine texture smoothed out, sharp edges given faint halos, subtle gradients broken into blocks. Those details are not hidden in the file waiting to be recovered. They are gone.

PNG is lossless, which means it stores exactly the pixels it is given. Converting a JPG to PNG therefore stores the JPG's compression artefacts perfectly, at great expense. You get a much larger file containing exactly the same visual information, flaws and all.

If you were hoping to sharpen a blurry photo or clean up a compressed image, no format conversion will do it. That is a job for an editor, not a converter.

How much bigger, exactly

Measured with this tool, on a 3024×4032 photograph:

An 8.6 MB PNG carrying the same picture as an 830 KB JPG is not a rare edge case — that ratio is typical for photographs. PNG compresses by finding repeated patterns of identical pixels. Photographs, full of sensor noise and continuous gradients, have almost none, so there is nothing for it to work with — see our full WebP vs JPG vs PNG comparison for how this plays out across different kinds of images.

When converting JPG to PNG is genuinely the right call

There are real reasons to do this, and if one of them applies you are in the right place:

• A tool or form only accepts PNG. Plenty of print services, design tools, government upload forms and older internal systems are stubborn about it. Compatibility is a perfectly good reason.
• You are about to edit and re-save repeatedly. Every save of a JPG re-compresses it and degrades it a little further. Converting to PNG first freezes the current state, so subsequent saves cost nothing in quality. Convert back to JPG when you are finished.
• You need to add transparency. A JPG cannot store transparency at all. Converting to PNG will not create any, but it gives you a format that can hold it once you cut out a background in an editor.
• The image is not really a photograph. A JPG of a screenshot, diagram, logo or scanned document may well get smaller as a PNG, because flat colour is what PNG compresses well. See the numbers on the PNG to JPG page for the reverse of this.

What happens to the metadata

Exif data is not carried into PNG output here. The metadata-preservation feature on this site targets JPG, where the Exif container is standard and universally read. PNG can technically hold Exif in a chunk, but support for reading it is patchy enough that writing it would create a false sense of security.

If keeping capture dates and camera information matters, keep a copy of the original JPG. If you are converting specifically to remove metadata before sharing, PNG output does that thoroughly.

A note on the quality slider

You will notice the quality control disappears when PNG is selected. That is not an oversight — PNG is lossless and has no quality parameter to set. Every PNG this tool produces stores your pixels exactly. The only way to make a PNG smaller is to reduce its dimensions or its colour count, neither of which this converter does.

Related conversions

• PNG to JPGThe reverse trip, and when it saves a lot of space
• JPG to WebPLossless-capable and far smaller than PNG
• Compress an imageIf size was the actual problem