Image formats explained: TIFF, WebP, SVG and when to use each

Most people stick to JPG and PNG and never think about it. That’s fine a lot of the time, but reach for the wrong format and you get a blurry print, a needlessly huge file, or a logo that won’t scale. A few other formats exist for good reasons. Here’s a quick tour of TIFF, WebP and SVG, and when each one earns its place.

A quick refresher on JPG and PNG

The two you already know, briefly. JPG is built for photographs; it squeezes files small by throwing away detail you mostly won’t notice, which is why it’s great for photos and bad for sharp-edged graphics. PNG keeps every pixel exactly and supports transparency, which makes it the go-to for logos, screenshots, and anything with crisp lines or a see-through background. Both are raster formats, grids of pixels.

TIFF: the archival heavyweight

TIFF is the format for maximum quality with no compromise. It can store an image with no quality loss at all, which makes it a favorite for archiving, professional photography, and scanning where every detail matters and you’ll edit the file later.

The trade-off is size. TIFF files are big, sometimes enormous. That’s the point, they keep everything, but it means TIFF is for storage and editing, not for emailing or putting on a website. If you’ve scanned something at high quality as TIFF and now need to share it, that’s exactly when you’d convert it into a more portable format, or a PDF.

WebP: small files for the web

WebP is a modern format designed by Google specifically to make web images smaller. It can do both styles of compression, lossy like JPG and lossless like PNG, and generally produces noticeably smaller files than either at similar quality. It also supports transparency and animation.

If you’re putting images on a website and want fast load times, WebP is usually the smart choice. The one catch is compatibility: very old software might not open it, though every modern browser does. For the web, it’s excellent; for sending a file to someone on unknown software, a safer JPG or PNG might travel better.

SVG: the one that never goes blurry

SVG is the odd one out, because it isn’t pixels at all. It’s a vector format: it stores instructions for drawing shapes, not a grid of dots. That means an SVG scales to any size and stays perfectly sharp, from a favicon to a billboard.

SVG is ideal for logos, icons, and simple illustrations, anything made of clean shapes. It’s useless for photographs, which are too complex to describe as shapes. If you have a logo as an SVG, use it; it’ll never go fuzzy no matter how big you blow it up.

The short cheat sheet

• Photograph for the web or email → JPG (or WebP for a smaller file).
• Logo, icon, screenshot, transparency needed → PNG (or SVG if it’s a logo/icon that must scale).
• Archiving or professional scanning, top quality → TIFF.
• Fastest web images → WebP.
• Anything that must stay sharp at any size → SVG.

Getting images into a PDF, privately

Whatever format you start from, you often end up wanting these images in one tidy PDF, a scan, a set of photos, a batch of receipts. files.co has an images to PDF tool for that, and a PDF to images tool for the reverse, both running in your browser.

That local-only part matters, because images are often personal: a scanned ID, a photographed document, private photos. files.co processes them on your own machine, with nothing uploaded, which you can confirm with DevTools (F12) or by working offline.

So the next time you’re choosing a format, you’ve got more than two options, and a reason for each. Pick the right one for the job, and when those images need to become a single document, turn them into a PDF in your browser without them ever leaving your machine.