Which Image Format Should You Use for Each Marketing Channel?

Image format decisions often get made by habit: export everything as JPG because that’s the Photoshop default, or PNG because it “looks better.” The format affects file size, visual quality, and compatibility, and on some platforms it determines whether the upload is accepted at all.

JPG

JPG is a lossy format: it discards some image data to keep file sizes small. For photographs with lots of colour gradations (product shots, lifestyle images, portraits) that discarded data is usually invisible at typical compression levels. A well-optimised JPG web photo should sit under 150KB.

The problem with JPG is hard edges. Logos, text overlaid on images, and flat-colour graphics all show visible compression artefacts around the edges. For anything with crisp lines or flat colour, JPG is the wrong choice.

PNG

PNG is lossless, so nothing is discarded during compression. It also supports transparency, which JPG does not. That combination makes it the right choice for logos, icons, and any graphic that needs to sit cleanly on a coloured background.

For photographs, PNG files are dramatically larger than JPG equivalents with no visible quality improvement. A photo that’s 100KB as a JPG can easily reach 1MB as a PNG.

WebP

WebP offers better compression than both JPG and PNG, typically 25–35% smaller than an equivalent JPG, and supports transparency. All modern browsers support it, and major CMSes including WordPress and Shopify handle it natively.

The limitation is email. Most email clients either don’t support WebP or handle it inconsistently, so converting email assets to WebP before sending is risky. Check platform requirements before converting anything destined for email.

SVG

SVG is a vector format defined mathematically rather than as pixels. It scales to any size with no quality loss, which makes it the right format for logos, icons, charts, and QR codes going to print. A 20KB SVG logo looks identical at 100px and at billboard scale.

SVG is only meaningful for images originally created as vectors. A JPG photograph converted to SVG just becomes a large, slow-loading file; the format has no effect on photographic image quality.

GIF

GIF supports animation but caps colours at 256, making it unsuitable for photographs. For short, simple animations in email (where video is unreliable) it still works. For anything else, MP4 produces better quality at a smaller file size, and most platforms now prefer it.

Summary table

Format	Best for	Transparency	Animation
JPG	Photos, complex images	No	No
PNG	Graphics, logos, text	Yes	No
WebP	Web images (all types)	Yes	Yes
SVG	Logos, icons, QR codes	Yes	Limited
GIF	Simple email animations	Yes	Yes

Converting formats locally

Resizing images before uploading to an ad platform or converting HEIC photos from a phone to JPG are common enough tasks that using an online converter each time is tedious, and those sites upload your files to a server you don’t control.

File Forge handles format conversion and resizing inside the browser, with nothing sent anywhere.