One image, seven ways out: choosing an output format without regret

2026-09-30

Our converter offers seven output formats, which is six opportunities to pick the wrong one. The good news: the decision is not about the image at all. It is about the destination — where is this file going next?

The three that cover almost everything

• JPG — going to other people. Upload forms, email, documents, marketplaces: thirty years of software reads JPG. Smallest for photos. Its one blind spot is transparency, which it fills with white.
• PNG — keeping every pixel. Transparency, sharp text, screenshots, logos, files you will edit again. Costs size on photographs, where its lossless promise buys nothing visible.
• WebP — publishing on your own site. Smaller than both at the same visible quality, transparency included. Weak only where old software lurks — which is why it's for pages you control, not files you hand around.

The four specialists

• PDF — when a form demands a document. Each image becomes a one-page PDF sized to itself.
• GIF — flat graphics for legacy corners. 256 colours, one frame; exact for simple art, speckled for photos.
• BMP / TIFF — feeding old or industrial software. Uncompressed and huge by design; choose them only when the receiving system reads nothing else.

Three quick tie-breakers

• Transparency to keep? PNG or WebP. Everything else flattens it to white — and the tool warns you first.
• A photograph? JPG (or WebP for the web). PNG and the specialists just cost bytes.
• Unsure? JPG. The worst case of JPG is a slightly bigger or slightly flattened file; the worst case of a specialist format is a file the recipient cannot open.

What goes in is broader than what comes out

The input side accepts more than the seven exits — PDFs unfold page by page, iPhone HEICs decode locally, TIFF and SVG convert straight across. Whatever arrives becomes ordinary images, and every tool on the site can take it from there. Nothing in any of it is uploaded.

What we deliberately don't do

No AVIF output — no browser can encode AVIF from a canvas, so offering the button would mean silently handing you a different format than the label promised. The seven on the menu are the seven that actually come out as labelled.

The short version

• Pick by destination: JPG to people, PNG for pixels and transparency, WebP for your own site.
• PDF for document-only forms; GIF for flat legacy graphics; BMP/TIFF for software that demands them.
• In doubt, JPG — its failure modes are the mildest.