Convert JPG to PNG — Free JPG to PNG Converter

How to Convert JPG to PNG

Why Convert JPG to PNG?

Need to add transparency to a photo or preserve every pixel for editing? Converting JPG to PNG gives you a lossless format that supports alpha transparency. This is essential when you need to layer images in a design tool, remove backgrounds, or create graphics where sharp edges matter.

PNG stores every pixel without further compression loss. Once you convert a JPG to PNG, subsequent edits and saves will not degrade quality any further. This makes PNG the preferred format for design workflows, screenshots, and any image that will be edited multiple times.

LeanImg converts your JPG to PNG entirely in your browser — images never leave your device. No upload, no server processing, no privacy concerns. Just drop your files and download the results.

Note that converting JPG to PNG will not recover quality already lost during JPG compression. The resulting PNG will be a perfect copy of the JPG pixels, just stored losslessly. Want smaller files instead? Try JPG to WebP for modern web use.

Compress your PNG · JPG to WebP

What changes going from JPG to PNG

Going this way the quality slider disappears, because PNG has nothing to trade. The JPEG is decoded once, written as an 8-bit RGBA PNG and then passed through oxipng at level 3, which rearranges the compression without touching a pixel. The alpha channel it gains is fully opaque everywhere; it's there so an editor can start erasing a background straight away.

The browser applies the EXIF orientation flag while decoding, so a phone photo stored sideways comes out upright, and the new file has no flag left to honor. Everything else in the JPEG's metadata stays behind: camera model, capture time, GPS position and the embedded color profile. For a photo you're about to publish that's a privacy feature; for an archive it's a loss, so keep the original.

Expect the file to grow by a large factor. A PNG holds four bytes per pixel before deflate gets to work, and JPEG's 8x8 block noise is exactly the kind of data deflate struggles with, so a photograph that was a few hundred kilobytes routinely comes back as several megabytes. Nothing about the picture improves in exchange; the blocks and the softened colors are preserved faithfully. Do this to make an editing master or to get an alpha channel. Don't do it to a photo bound for a web page, where the bigger file buys you nothing a visitor can see.

JPG vs PNG

What is a PNG file?

PNG became a W3C Recommendation in October 1996, designed after Unisys began enforcing the LZW patent that GIF relied on. It is lossless and only lossless: one compression method, deflate, applied after per-scanline filters. Every tool advertising a lossy PNG is really quantizing to a 256 color palette before writing an ordinary lossless PNG. Transparency comes in three grades: a real alpha channel at 8 or 16 bits, up to 256 alpha levels from a palette table, or a single keyed color.

How to open a PNG file

Nothing needs installing anywhere: Preview and Quick Look on macOS, Photos and Paint on Windows, and libpng as a base dependency on Linux mean GIMP, Krita and every GTK or Qt application read it. The interesting tools are the optimizers — optipng, oxipng and zopflipng rewrite the file losslessly, and LeanImg's compressor runs oxipng at optimization level 3 without ever changing a pixel.

Convert other formats to PNG

Convert JPG to other formats

• JPG to WebP
• JPG to AVIF
• JPG to PDF

Frequently Asked Questions