Drop in an image, pick an output format, download it. The conversion happens in your browser using the same canvas the page is drawn with — which is why it is instant, why nothing is uploaded, and why the list of output formats is shorter than you might expect.
Why there is no input format to choose
Most converters make you pick both sides: PNG to JPG, WebP to PNG, and so on for every pairing. That is theatre. The browser decodes whatever it can display — PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, SVG — and once decoded, every image is just pixels. The source format has stopped existing.
So the only real decision is the output, and the input selector was never doing anything but filtering which files you could pick. This tool asks the one question that matters and skips the one that does not.
Three output formats, because there are only three
PNG, JPG and WebP are the complete list of what a browser canvas can encode. Not a design decision — a hard limit of the platform.
This is worth stating plainly because the limit is invisible and browsers do not enforce it honestly. Ask a canvas for AVIF or GIF and it does not refuse: it silently returns a PNG, with the wrong MIME type attached. Nothing throws, nothing warns. You get a file called photo.avif that is a PNG inside, and it will open fine everywhere because decoders read the bytes rather than the name — so the deception can survive a long time before anyone notices.
This page previously existed as twenty separate converters, and eight of them were doing exactly that: png-to-gif, jpg-to-avif and their siblings were serving renamed PNGs to anyone who used them. They looked like they worked. That is why this tool checks the MIME prefix of what the canvas actually returned, and tells you when a format is unavailable rather than handing you a lie.
Choosing the output
WebP for the web, in almost every case. Every browser in use supports it, and it is typically 25–35% smaller than JPG at the same visual quality. The exception is anything that might leave a browser — some desktop software and older mail clients still refuse it.
JPG for photographs going anywhere unpredictable. It is universal and it will be for the rest of your life. Note that it has no transparency: convert a PNG with a transparent background to JPG and the transparent areas become white, because JPG has no way to record "nothing here". That is not a bug and it cannot be fixed — the format has no alpha channel. This tool fills with white rather than the black you would get by default, which is almost always what you wanted.
PNG for anything with sharp edges or transparency: screenshots, logos, line art, UI. It is lossless, which is also why it is the wrong answer for photographs — it cannot compress photographic noise and will produce a file several times larger than a JPG nobody could distinguish from it.
What quality does and does not do
The quality slider appears for JPG and WebP and vanishes for PNG, because PNG is lossless and the number would do nothing. That is not the tool being coy — a canvas ignores the quality argument entirely for PNG, and every setting from 1 to 100 returns byte-identical output.
For the two lossy formats, 75–85 is the range where photographs look untouched. Above 90 you are spending a lot of bytes on differences nobody can see. Below 60, blocking artefacts appear in smooth gradients — skies and skin first. And the numbers are not comparable across encoders: quality 80 here and quality 80 in Photoshop are different settings that happen to share a number.
Your metadata does not survive
A canvas holds pixels and nothing else. EXIF, the camera model, the timestamp, the copyright field, the colour profile and the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken are all absent from the output.
For publishing, that is a privacy win worth having — phone photos routinely carry the exact location they were taken, and a lot of images on the internet are quietly broadcasting somebody's home address. It is a loss in two cases: if you needed the copyright field preserved, and if the original relied on a colour profile. A photo tagged Adobe RGB or Display P3 will have its pixels read as sRGB once the profile is gone, and saturated colours will shift flat. If your output looks washed out next to the input, that is what happened.
Common questions
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. This tool is marked "client": the file is read, decoded and re-encoded by your own machine and never sent. Worth knowing given how many conversion sites do upload — you are handing a stranger a photo that, until they strip it, still says where and when it was taken.
Why can I not convert to AVIF or GIF?
Because no browser can encode them from a canvas. The option is absent rather than broken, which is a deliberate choice: a converter that offers AVIF and quietly gives you a PNG is worse than one that says it cannot. For real AVIF you need a tool with an encoder built in — Squoosh runs one in your browser, and any image pipeline on a server will have one.
Why did my transparent background turn white?
You converted to JPG, which has no alpha channel and therefore no way to express transparency. White is this tool's deliberate choice; the canvas default would give you black, which is almost never what anyone wants. If you need the transparency, the output has to be PNG or WebP.
Does converting lose quality?
It depends which direction. Anything to PNG is lossless — the pixels arrive intact. Anything to JPG or WebP re-encodes and loses a little, and if the source was already a JPG, that is a second generation of loss stacked on the first. Convert from the best original you have rather than from something that has already been through the mill, because the damage accumulates and never reverses.
Can I convert several images at once?
Not here — this is one image at a time. For a folder of them, a command-line tool like ImageMagick or a build-step plugin will do the whole set in one pass and keeps working when you need it again next month. This tool is for the one-off conversion where opening a terminal is more effort than the job deserves.