Image Converter

The converter reads the everyday photo formats, JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and AVIF, and a long tail of less common ones: camera raw files such as CR2, NEF, ARW and DNG, Photoshop documents, TIFF scans, icon files, game textures and vector files like SVG and EPS. The two lists above come straight from the converter's own settings, so they always show the full set.

On the output side, raster formats such as JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and BMP are the usual choices. A few targets have a narrower purpose: ICO and ICNS are icon containers that can bundle several sizes in one file, DDS and VTF are texture formats used by games, and PSD gives you a single-layer file for Photoshop. If you are not sure which one a website or program wants, look for the list of accepted file types next to its upload button; most forms print it there. For changing the dimensions or the file size rather than the format, the other image tools work the same way.

The right format depends on where the picture is going, not on how it looks now. Two questions settle almost every case: what can the person or system on the other side open, and does the picture have transparent areas or motion that must survive? The three cards below cover the answers most people need.

Browsers are the easy part. Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all display JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF. HEIC is the odd one out: among these four, only Safari shows it, starting with version 17. That is why iPhone photos so often need converting before they go onto a website or to someone on Windows. WebP has the opposite problem: browsers love it, but a picture saved from a web page as WebP may not open in an older editor or pass an upload form, which is the case WebP to JPG is set up for.

Outside the browser things are less tidy. Email clients, office suites, older photo editors, printers and official upload portals each keep their own list of accepted types, and those lists change slowly. AVIF and HEIC make smaller files than JPG at similar quality, but fewer programs read them, so they suit pictures you publish yourself. When you cannot check what the other side supports, send JPG for photos and PNG for graphics.

GIF deserves a word too. It is still the most widely accepted format for short animations, but each frame is limited to 256 colors, so photographs look grainy in it. TIFF and BMP are mostly asked for by print shops and older software that names them explicitly.

Every conversion follows the same path: the source is decoded into pixels, your settings are applied, and the pixels are written out in the new format. Because the middle step is just pixels, any input can become any output, but nothing is gained along the way. A blurry WebP stays blurry as a PNG, and a small picture does not become sharper by being saved in a lossless format.

Lossy formats (JPG, WebP, AVIF and HEIC) give up some detail each time they are saved, while lossless formats such as PNG, TIFF and BMP store the pixels exactly. Going from lossy to lossless keeps the image exactly as it is now, at the cost of a larger file. Going from lossless to lossy at quality 85 gives a much lighter file that usually looks the same on screen, which is why photos are almost always shared as JPG.