Where PNG, JPG, WebP, SVG, BMP, TIFF, HEIC and GIF came from, where they're used today, and how good they actually are.
PNG was created in 1996 as a free, open replacement for GIF, after Unisys began enforcing patent royalties on GIF's underlying LZW compression algorithm. A group of graphics developers designed PNG from scratch to be patent-unencumbered, and it quickly became a W3C-recommended standard. Unlike GIF's 256-colour palette, PNG supported full 24-bit colour and true alpha transparency from day one.
Today PNG is the default choice for anything that needs pixel-perfect accuracy: logos, icons, screenshots, UI mockups, diagrams, and any image with transparency or sharp text/edges. It's the standard export format across design tools like Figma and Photoshop when fidelity matters more than file size.
PNG is always lossless — it reproduces the exact original pixels, every time, with no generational quality loss even after repeated re-saves. It compresses using the DEFLATE algorithm (the same family used by ZIP and gzip), preceded by per-row filtering that predicts each pixel from its neighbours to make the data more compressible. The trade-off is size: because it doesn't discard any information, PNG files for photographic content are typically several times larger than an equivalent JPEG or WebP.
Published in 1992 by the ISO/CCITT committee that gave the format its name, JPEG was designed specifically to make continuous-tone photographs practical to store and transmit at a time when disk space and modem bandwidth were both extremely limited. Its arrival coincided with, and helped enable, the rise of digital cameras and the early photographic web.
JPEG remains the default format for photographs across the web, social media, e-commerce product imagery, and virtually every digital camera and phone. Its near-universal compatibility, going back three decades, makes it the safest choice when you can't control what will open the file.
JPEG is a lossy format: it splits an image into 8×8 pixel blocks, converts each block into frequency data using a Discrete Cosine Transform, then discards the frequency detail the human eye is least sensitive to via a quantization step — this is exactly what a "quality" setting controls. At high quality (85–95%) the loss is generally imperceptible; below roughly 50% you start to see blocky artifacts and colour banding. JPEG has no transparency channel and handles sharp edges or text poorly compared to PNG.
WebP was released by Google in 2010, built on the intra-frame keyframe coding from the VP8 video codec that Google acquired along with On2 Technologies. It was designed explicitly to be a smaller, modern alternative to both JPEG and PNG for web delivery, and later gained a dedicated lossless mode and animation support, filling GIF's role too.
WebP has become the format of choice for web performance: image CDNs and frameworks (Cloudinary, imgix, Next.js Image, and others) increasingly auto-convert uploads to WebP for faster page loads and better Core Web Vitals scores. Every major modern browser — Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari since version 14 — supports it natively.
WebP supports both modes in one format. Lossy WebP uses predictive block coding similar in spirit to JPEG but more efficient, typically producing files 25–35% smaller than JPEG at equivalent visual quality, and it supports an alpha channel that JPEG lacks. Lossless WebP uses image-specific prediction and colour transforms on top of its own LZ77-style compression, and typically beats PNG by around 26% at identical quality with no loss at all. The trade-off is that, being newer, it has slightly less support in older third-party tools and legacy software than JPEG or PNG.
SVG became a W3C Recommendation in 2001, an XML-based format developed to bring resolution-independent graphics to the web at a time when every other option, GIF, JPEG, PNG, stored a fixed grid of pixels.
SVG is now the standard for icons, logos, illustrations and UI graphics across the web, since it scales to any size or resolution without quality loss and files are typically tiny for simple artwork. It's not suited to photographs.
SVG doesn't store pixels at all — it's a text-based description of shapes, paths, gradients and text, rendered at whatever resolution is actually needed. That makes it infinitely sharp at any zoom level, but converting one to a raster format like PNG means picking a fixed resolution to render at, which discards that resolution independence in exchange for universal compatibility with tools that only understand pixels.
BMP dates back to the original Windows GUI in the 1980s, making it one of the earliest raster formats still in use, designed as Windows' native, largely uncompressed bitmap.
Largely superseded on the web, BMP still turns up from legacy Windows tools, some scanning and imaging software, and older enterprise systems whose pipelines never modernized.
Most BMP files store pixels completely uncompressed, or with a basic run-length scheme for images with few colours, which is exactly why the files are so large. There's no quality dial to turn: BMP simply doesn't compress the way JPEG, PNG or WebP do.
Introduced by Aldus (later absorbed into Adobe) in 1986, TIFF gave the emerging desktop publishing and scanning industries a single flexible format for storing high-fidelity images.
TIFF remains the standard in professional photography, printing and archival workflows, where a photo might be edited and re-saved many times and any lossy re-compression would compound quality loss with each pass.
TIFF is a flexible container rather than a single codec: it can store pixels uncompressed or with lossless compression like LZW or DEFLATE, and it supports high bit depths and multiple pages. That flexibility is exactly why TIFF files run large, and why they're typically converted down to JPEG before publishing on the web.
HEIF was standardized by MPEG in 2015, and Apple adopted HEIC, its variant encoded with HEVC (H.265), as the default photo format on iPhones starting with iOS 11 in 2017.
Every iPhone since then saves photos as HEIC by default, roughly half the size of an equivalent JPEG at the same visual quality, but many Windows applications, older Android devices and websites still can't open it directly, which is the single most common reason people need to convert it to JPG.
HEIC stores images using the same intra-frame compression tools as HEVC video: variable block sizes up to 64×64 predicted from neighbouring blocks, more efficient than JPEG's fixed 8×8 blocks and older quantization scheme. That efficiency comes at the cost of software support — most non-Apple software needs a dedicated decoder just to open the file at all.
Released by CompuServe in 1987, GIF was one of the first widely supported image formats on early online services and the web. Its LZW-based compression later triggered the patent dispute that led directly to PNG's creation.
Nearly extinct for photography, GIF is still everywhere for short looping animations, reaction memes and simple UI illustrations, kept alive mostly by its built-in animation support and universal compatibility, even as WebP and video formats now offer smaller files for the same content.
GIF is limited to a palette of at most 256 colours per frame, and compresses the resulting indexed pixels losslessly with LZW. That palette limit makes GIF a poor choice for photographs, producing visible banding and dithering, but it's fine for flat-colour graphics, and it remains the only format on this page with native animation support built in.
Curious about file size specifically? See how each format compresses.