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Benchmo
Language: English

Convert JPG to PNG

Get an upright PNG copy of a JPG for editing, or for a form that insists on PNG.

Convert to

Processed on your device. Files are not uploaded.

Expect the PNG to be about nine times the size of the JPG. A 31.6 KB photo of a cat became a 285 KB PNG, and a 234 KB picture of the Hubble Deep Field became 2.1 MB. Nothing went wrong: the PNG is the same picture, pixel for pixel, stored in a format that refuses to throw anything away.

Why it grows that much

A JPEG never stores the pixels themselves. It cuts the picture into 8×8 blocks, describes each block as a sum of smooth wave patterns, and rounds away the fine patterns your eye barely notices. That rounding is where the small file comes from. To make a PNG, the converter has to rebuild every pixel and write each one down exactly, including the faint block noise the JPEG left behind. PNG can only save space where pixels repeat, and in a photo they almost never do. Both sample photos grew almost exactly nine times.

Sideways photos come out upright

The cat sample is stored the way many phones store photos: the pixels lie on their side, 300×451, with an EXIF tag saying “rotate 90° when showing”. Viewers obey the tag, so it looks normal, but a converter that ignores it gives you a sideways picture. Here the rotation is applied to the pixels, and the PNG came out 451×300, upright, exactly as the photo looked before conversion.

Worth it when

  • you are about to edit the photo and save it several times, since each JPG save compresses again;
  • a form, app or template accepts only PNG;
  • you want to place the photo in a design and keep it as one lossless layer.

It is not worth it to make a photo look sharper, because it won’t, or to make a file smaller, because it gets bigger. For a transparent background, the tool you want is Remove background, and going the other way is PNG to JPG.

Questions and answers

Does converting JPG to PNG improve quality?

No. The PNG is an exact copy of the JPG's pixels, compression artifacts included. What it does is stop further loss: edit it and save it as PNG again, and nothing more is lost.

Will the PNG have a transparent background?

No. A JPG has no transparency, so the PNG is fully opaque. To cut out the background, use Remove background.

Why does my photo come out sideways in other converters?

Phones and cameras often store the pixels sideways and add an EXIF orientation tag that tells viewers to rotate. A converter that ignores the tag saves a sideways picture. This one applies the rotation to the pixels, so the PNG is upright.

Is the location and camera information kept?

No. EXIF details such as GPS location, camera model and date taken are not copied. The JPG's color profile is kept if it has one.

Can it read CMYK JPGs from a print shop?

Yes. When the built-in decoder cannot read a JPG, such as a CMYK file, your browser decodes it instead and converts its colors to standard RGB for the PNG.