JPG Converter

When a JPG converter is the right tool, and when it isn't

JPG was designed for photographs. Its lossy compression throws away detail the eye barely notices, so a phone photo or a scanned page ends up small and opens anywhere. That makes JPG the safe choice for sharing, uploading and printing.

JPG is the wrong choice in three cases. It has no transparency, so cut-outs and logos get a white box behind them. It blurs hard edges slightly, which shows on screenshots full of text. And every re-save loses a little more, so an image you will keep editing belongs in a lossless format. For those, use the PNG converter.

Why the JPG can end up bigger or smaller than the original

Converting from PNG, BMP, TIFF or TGA usually shrinks the file a lot, because those formats store far more data per pixel. Converting from WebP, AVIF or HEIC often does the opposite: they compress more efficiently than JPG, so the same picture as a JPG can be larger.

The mode matters too. Quality saves at 95 and produces the largest files; Compact saves at 58 for files that are far smaller with some visible softening. If you need the JPG under a limit such as 200 KB, convert first and then use the image compressor.

If you add a file that is already a JPG, Compact is selected for it automatically, since a smaller file is the only reason to convert a JPG into a JPG. When re-saving can't beat the original size, you get the original file back untouched.

Does converting to JPG remove location data?

Yes, in practice. Phones store details such as the camera model, the date and often the GPS position inside each photo. This converter draws the picture onto a canvas and encodes a new file from those pixels, so none of that information is copied into the JPG.

The photo still appears the right way up: orientation is applied before the new file is written.

One exception: when a JPG comes back unchanged because re-saving would not make it smaller, it is your original file and still carries the information it had.