September 20, 2026 · fileo Compress

JPEG vs PNG vs WebP — pick by the picture, not the myth

People search “best image format” as if there were a trophy. There isn’t. There is a photograph, a logo, and a screenshot, and they want different containers.

JPEG: the photograph bucket

JPEG is a 1990s compromise that still wins for camera output. It divides the image into blocks, throws away high-frequency detail the eye is bad at counting, and packs the rest. That is why a blue sky at quality 40 looks like bathroom tile and why a forest at quality 80 looks fine. Use JPEG (or WebP) for anything that came off a sensor. Do not use it for a one-pixel black letter on white.

PNG: the document bucket

PNG is closer to a zip file of pixels. Screenshots, UI kits, and type-on-flat-color stay honest. Photographs saved as PNG are a habit from “I don’t want to lose quality” — you keep the quality and also keep a 9 MB file that a phone on a bus has to pull. If the PNG has thousands of unique colors and no sharp UI, it is a photo. Convert it.

WebP: the web bucket

WebP can be lossy like JPEG or lossless like PNG, with optional transparency. In 2026, every browser you care about decodes it. Lossy WebP is the default I use for blog heroes unless a partner’s CMS refuses the type. Then I keep JPEG. I do not keep both on disk unless I am building the picture element myself.

A two-minute rule

If you can read small text in the image and it must stay readable, start with PNG. If it looks like a place you could stand, start with JPEG or WebP at quality 80. If you need transparency on a photo (a cut-out product), WebP or PNG-24; then check the byte count and be honest about whether the page can afford it.

fileo Compress will not choose for you. The format menu is the choice. The previews are the test. That is the whole method.

Email, chat, and “must be JPG” forms

Some forms still only accept .jpg. Convert there even if WebP is smaller. Some chat apps recompress whatever you send; putting a 200 KB file in still helps because their second pass starts from less noise. Email clients often block WebP inline. JPEG remains the lingua franca of attachments. None of that is an SEO rule. It is just where the file is going next.

Color and profiles

Canvas export typically lands in sRGB-ish display space. If you work in Adobe RGB for print, this is the wrong tool. Convert and proof in a photo app, then make a web copy here. Wide-gamut JPEGs that look neon on the web were usually a profile problem, not a quality-slider problem.

Open the compressor with a file you already argue about and look at the two byte counts. The argument usually ends there.