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Image format

JPG converter

A .jpg file is a photograph or other continuous-tone image compressed with the JPEG standard, the most widely used image codec ever shipped. Nearly every camera, phone, and website produces or accepts .jpg files, which makes it the default interchange format for photos.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop JPG files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where JPG comes from

The Joint Photographic Experts Group published the underlying standard in 1992 as ITU-T T.81 and ISO/IEC 10918-1. The JFIF container convention, drafted by Eric Hamilton at C-Cube Microsystems, gave the compressed stream a portable file wrapper, and by the mid-1990s JPEG had become the baseline photo format for both the web and digital cameras.

How JPG works

  • Compresses 8x8 pixel blocks with a discrete cosine transform followed by quantization, which is where detail is discarded
  • Stores 8 bits per channel in YCbCr color, usually with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling that halves color resolution in both axes
  • Has no alpha channel, so transparency cannot be represented
  • Image dimensions are capped at 65,535 pixels per side
  • Supports baseline (top-to-bottom) and progressive (coarse-to-fine) scan orders

When to use JPG

  • Publishing photographs on websites where file size and universal support matter
  • Sharing camera or phone photos over email and messaging apps
  • Exporting final photo edits for clients who may open them on any device
  • Printing snapshots at consumer labs that expect JPEG input

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Opens everywhere, from 1990s software to the newest phone
  • Excellent size-to-quality ratio for photographic content
  • Quality is tunable, letting you trade file size against artifacts
  • Hardware-accelerated decoding makes it extremely fast to display

Limitations

  • Every re-save re-compresses the image, so quality erodes across editing generations
  • Low quality settings produce visible 8x8 blocking and ringing around edges
  • No transparency support
  • 8-bit depth leaves little headroom for heavy exposure or color correction

Compatibility

JPEG is supported by every mainstream operating system, browser, image editor, and printer driver in use today. It decodes natively on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux without any add-on codecs, and every browser has rendered it since the format reached the web in the 1990s.

Carries EXIF (camera settings, GPS, orientation), XMP, and IPTC records in APPn marker segments, plus embedded ICC color profiles and thumbnails.

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Convert other formats to JPG