PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. Unlike JPG, it uses lossless compression, so no detail is lost, and it supports a transparent background.
That makes PNG the right choice for logos, icons, diagrams, screenshots and any graphic with sharp edges or text. The trade-off is bigger files than JPG for full photographs.
You can convert to PNG, crop a PNG into a circle or remove a background to get transparency — free, in your browser.
Why PNG files are so large for photos
PNG compression is lossless, which means it must reproduce every pixel exactly. It achieves that by finding repetition — runs of identical or predictable pixels — which works brilliantly for flat colour and terribly for photographs, where almost every pixel differs slightly from its neighbours. A photo saved as PNG is commonly five to ten times larger than the same photo as a JPG that nobody could tell apart. Saving photos as PNG is one of the most common causes of needlessly heavy web pages and bounced email attachments.
Transparency and the alpha channel
PNG stores an extra alpha channel alongside red, green and blue, recording how opaque each pixel is. That allows genuinely soft edges — a shadow that fades out, anti-aliased text that sits cleanly on any background colour. It is why PNG is the format for logos and interface assets, and why converting a PNG to JPG replaces that transparency with a solid colour.
PNG-8 and PNG-24
PNG-8 uses a palette of up to 256 colours and produces small files for simple graphics like icons and flat illustrations. PNG-24 stores full colour and is what most tools export by default. For a simple logo the difference in size can be substantial, while for anything with gradients PNG-8 introduces visible banding.
Choosing between PNG and WebP
WebP does everything PNG does, including transparency and lossless mode, at a meaningfully smaller size. Every current browser supports it. PNG remains the safer choice when a file has to be opened by older desktop software, sent to a printer, or handed to someone whose tooling you do not control.