WebP vs AVIF vs JPG: which should you use?

Image formats are mostly a trade between file size, quality and how many things can open the file. Here's where each one sits, without the marketing.

JPG: still the one that always works

Nearly thirty years old, lossy, no transparency, and still the right answer whenever a file has to be accepted by something you don't control — a government portal, an old print shop, a colleague's ancient software. Every camera, phone and form understands it.

PNG: not a photo format

PNG is lossless, so it never blurs text or flat colour, and it supports transparency. That makes it ideal for logos, icons and screenshots — and a poor choice for photographs, where it produces files several times larger than a JPG nobody could tell apart.

WebP: the sensible default for websites

WebP does both jobs: lossy compression for photos at roughly 25–35% smaller than JPG, and lossless with transparency for graphics. Every current browser supports it, so for images you publish yourself it's the straightforward choice.

AVIF: smallest, slowest to make

AVIF compresses hardest — often around half the size of an equivalent JPG, and noticeably better than WebP at low quality, where it avoids the blocky look. The cost is encoding time: making an AVIF takes meaningfully longer, which is why some tools load a separate encoder for it.

Support is good now — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari since version 16 — but "good" isn't "universal", so it's a format for images you serve on your own site, not files you hand to someone else.

A simple rule

• Uploading to a form, or sending to a person? JPG.
• Logo, icon, screenshot, or anything needing transparency? PNG — or WebP if it's for your own site.
• Images on a website you control? WebP, and AVIF if you're chasing page speed.
• Archiving originals? Keep what the camera gave you and convert copies.

Converting between lossy formats always loses a little quality, because the image is decoded and re-encoded. Convert from the original whenever you can, rather than from an already-converted copy.