Which is better, JPG or PNG?

Neither. They are built for different pictures and the question only has an answer once you say what the picture is. PNG stores every pixel exactly, which makes it right for screenshots, logos, charts and anything with hard edges or flat colour, and wasteful for photographs. JPG throws away detail people cannot see, which makes it right for photographs and poor for text, where the discarded detail is exactly the part that mattered. A screenshot as a JPG and a photo as a PNG are both mistakes, in opposite directions.

Is PNG better quality than JPG?

Only for the picture it is given. PNG is lossless, so it introduces no loss of its own, and that is a genuine advantage when you are editing and re-saving. It says nothing about the quality of what you started with. A PNG made from a heavily compressed JPG is a perfect copy of a poor picture. The word lossless describes what the format does to your file, not what it can recover from an earlier one.

How do I make the background of a JPG transparent?

Not by converting it. You need a background removal tool, which decides which pixels are the subject and deletes the rest, and then you save the result as PNG so the transparency has somewhere to live. The conversion is the last step of that job, not the job itself. Doing it the other way round, converting first and hoping, gives you a PNG with a solid white background and no way to tell it apart from the JPG.

Does converting between formats repeatedly damage a picture?

It depends which formats. Every save as JPG applies lossy compression again, so JPG to PNG to JPG to PNG loses a little on each JPG step and the damage accumulates. This is called generation loss and it is why old memes look the way they do. Converting to PNG and staying there costs nothing after the first step, because PNG adds no loss at all. If you are going to work on a picture over several sessions, get it into PNG early and export to JPG once at the end.

Should I use PNG for photos on my website?

Almost never. A photograph as a PNG is commonly five times the size of a JPG that looks identical, and page weight is the main thing a visitor on a phone feels. Use JPG, or better, WebP, which is smaller again at the same quality and keeps transparency too. Reserve PNG for the things it is good at: logos, icons, screenshots, diagrams, and anything that needs a see-through background.

How to convert JPG to PNG

Every method, on every operating system, plus the two things people expect the conversion to fix and the honest answer about which direction you probably want.

Free toolImage ConverterPNG, JPG, WebP and AVIF, converted by the same codecs your browser uses to show them.Open the converter

The short answer

Use software already on the machine. Nothing needs installing, and no file needs uploading anywhere.

Windows: open it in Paint, then File, Save as, PNG picture.
Mac: open it in Preview, then File, Export, and choose PNG.
A folder of them, on a Mac: select all, right-click, Quick Actions, Convert Image.
Any device: a browser converter, which needs no install at all.

Before you do any of that, it is worth thirty seconds on whether you want this conversion. The next section is the part most pages leave out.

First, check you want this direction

JPG to PNG is the right move less often than the search volume suggests. It makes the file several times bigger and, on its own, improves nothing about the picture. There are three cases where it is clearly correct.

You are about to edit it. Every save as JPG runs the lossy encoder again, so a picture opened, tweaked and saved five times has been through five rounds of compression. Convert to PNG first, work in PNG, export to JPG once at the end. This is the strongest reason on the list.

Something downstream demands PNG. Upload validators, print workflows and plenty of internal software accept exactly one or two formats. If a form says PNG, it usually says so because it needs the transparency or the exactness.

You are about to add transparency. You cannot cut a background out and keep the result in JPG, because JPG has no alpha channel. PNG is where that work has to land.

Outside those three, keeping the JPG is usually the better call. And if the file is a screenshot or a diagram that somebody saved as a JPG by mistake, converting to PNG will not remove the compression halos already round the text. It will preserve them faithfully.

The two things it cannot do

These come up constantly, and both answers are no. Neither is a limitation of any particular tool. They follow from what the formats are.

It will not improve the quality

A JPG is what is left after an encoder decided which detail to discard. Those decisions are not recorded anywhere in the file, so there is nothing for a converter to read back and restore. Blur stays blur; blocking stays blocking; the halo round the text stays exactly where it was. The PNG is a perfect copy of a reduced picture.

What does exist is upscaling and AI restoration software, which invents plausible detail rather than recovering real detail. That is a different job with different trade-offs, and no format conversion performs it.

It will not make the background transparent

PNG is capable of transparency. Your JPG contains none. The conversion copies pixels across as it finds them, so a white background stays white and a coloured one stays coloured.

Making a background transparent means deciding, pixel by pixel, what is the subject and what is not. That is background removal, and it needs a tool built for it. Converting to PNG is the step that comes afterwards, so the result has somewhere to keep the transparency you just created.

On Windows

Paint, for one file

Open the JPG in Paint, then File → Save as → PNG picture. That is the whole procedure, and Paint has been on every Windows install for thirty years. Windows Photos can do it too, through the three-dot menu and Save as.

PowerShell, for a folder

Windows has no built-in batch converter with a menu, but it does have .NET, which is enough:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Drawing
Get-ChildItem *.jpg | ForEach-Object {
  $img = [System.Drawing.Image]::FromFile($_.FullName)
  $img.Save(($_.FullName -replace '\.jpg$', '.png'), [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Png)
  $img.Dispose()
}

Run it in the folder holding the files. It leaves the originals alone and writes a PNG beside each one.

On a Mac

Preview, for one file

Open the JPG in Preview, then File → Export, and choose PNG from the Format menu. Preview is on every Mac and needs no setup.

Finder, for a folder

Select the files in Finder, right-click, and choose Quick Actions → Convert Image. Pick PNG and a size, and it writes the converted copies alongside the originals. This handles several hundred files without complaint and is the fastest route on macOS by a distance.

The command line

The sips tool has shipped with macOS for years:

sips -s format png photo.jpg --out photo.png

Or for everything in a folder:

for f in *.jpg; do sips -s format png "$f" --out "${f%.jpg}.png"; done

In Photoshop and GIMP

In Photoshop, File → Save a Copy and pick PNG, or Export → Export As for more control over the compression and the colour profile. For a folder, File → Scripts → Image Processor handles the batch and lets you resize at the same time.

In GIMP, File → Export As, then type a filename ending in .png. GIMP picks the format from the extension, which catches people out the first time. The Script-Fu console handles batches if you need one.

In the browser, with nothing installed

Every browser can already decode a JPG and encode a PNG, which means the conversion can happen in the page with no server involved at all. That is what the JPG to PNG converter on this site does: the file is read by your browser, converted on your own machine, and never transmitted anywhere.

It matters for two reasons beyond privacy. A locked-down work laptop that will not let you install Paint alternatives will still run a web page. And a folder of two hundred photos converts as fast as your processor manages, with no upload queue in the way, because there is no upload.

Going the other way is on PNG to JPG, which is the more common need, and the image converter is the same tool with every format available at once.

A note on WebP

If your reason for wanting PNG is "something will not open my file", and the file is a WebP rather than a JPG, that is a different problem with a different answer. See how to open a WebP file.

And if you are choosing a format for the web rather than for editing, WebP is worth considering over both of these. It is smaller than JPG at the same quality and it keeps transparency like PNG, which makes the old either-or choice mostly historical. The catch is that Safari cannot write one, so a browser tool can only offer it on some machines.