The question of PNG vs JPG has been debated on forums and across social media for years. “What should I use? It depends!” is an answer that’s true in so many situations, but it’s also a cop-out. So let’s dive in to the details.
PNG images are better than JPGs if:
PNGs are better if you want to keep the quality of the image. They’re also good if you want to keep transparency, as they support alpha channels (the ability for an image to have varying levels of transparency).
JPGs are better if file size is a concern. PNGs are bigger than JPGs because they contain more information and don’t need to be compressed as much in order to reduce their size.
JPG images are better than PNGs if:
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s talk about when it’s best to use a PNG file and when it’s better to use a JPG. As with most things in life, there are no hard and fast rules on this one but here are some general guidelines for choosing between the two:
- If your image is mostly solid colors or line art (like logos, clipart), then JPEGs may be better because they compress smaller than PNGs due to their lossy compression—which means they will take up less space on your website. This can save you money if you’re hosting with a provider like Fusion Arc Hosting who charges per MB of storage used.
- If your images have lots of areas of pure black such as shadows or if those areas contain subtle gradients rather than just flat color blocks then JPGs tend not to do as good of job at compressing them without degrading quality too much (although this does vary from image type). In these cases, using a lossless compression option like PNG-24 will yield better results because it doesn’t eliminate any data from the original source materials.
Conclusion
The answer is not black and white. If you want to use the best image format for your needs, you need to consider a few things:
The image size and quality. For example, if you’re creating a website with lots of images that need to be displayed quickly on mobile devices then PNG would be better than JPG.
How much time can you spend optimizing images? If time is no issue then go ahead with JPG since they compress better but if time is an issue then use PNGs instead because they aren’t as hard on your computer’s resources which means less work for both CPU and RAM when processing them before displaying them in any type of application… even web browsers!
