What changes when a JPG becomes a PNG
The picture looks the same. The PNG stores the JPG’s pixels exactly, including its compression artifacts, so detail the JPG already discarded does not come back: a PNG made from a blurry JPG is still blurry.
What you gain is a lossless working copy. You can crop, annotate and save the PNG again and again without adding another round of JPG compression each time.
Why the file gets much bigger
Lossless compression handles the fine grain of photographs badly. In our tests a 1280×575 landscape JPG of 221,419 bytes became a 1,644,018-byte PNG — 7.4 times larger. Five to ten times is typical for photos.
The browser’s PNG encoder also skips the slow optimisation passes of dedicated PNG tools, so even images that started as PNG can come out 40% larger or more. Each row shows the exact result, with a note whenever the PNG is larger than the original.
PNG does not make the background transparent
A JPG has no transparency, and converting it does not create any: the white or coloured background stays in the pixels. Every JPG row carries a reminder after conversion.
To get a transparent logo or product photo, remove the background first in an image editor or a background-removal tool, then save the result as PNG.
When you actually need PNG
- An upload form, template or print service that accepts only PNG.
- Editing in several steps, where each JPG save would add more loss.
- Adding text, arrows or overlays to a photo and keeping those edges crisp.
- For sharing or the web, keep the JPG — or convert JPG to WebP for a smaller file.
PNG too big, still blurry or sideways?
- The PNG is too large for an email or form: use Max width under Resize. Halving the width cuts the number of pixels to a quarter.
- The PNG still looks blurry: the blur was already in the JPG, and converting cannot sharpen it.
- The photo was sideways: the EXIF orientation is applied while decoding, so the PNG is stored upright.
- Location data: EXIF, including GPS, is removed by default.