Every format this site opens, exports and refuses

Reference

Published 4 November 2026 · What photoedit.in opens, what it exports, and which tool to use for each format

Format questions cause more avoidable damage than any other part of image work. A transparent logo exported to JPEG picks up a black or white box. A wide-gamut photograph loses its colour when the profile is dropped. A screenshot saved as a low-quality JPEG develops halos around every letter. None of these are bugs; they are the consequences of choosing a container that cannot hold what you put in it. This page is the reference for those choices, split into what the browser editor handles and what the file tools handle, because the two are not the same.

Formats the editor opens

The editor is a canvas application. It decodes a file into pixels, lets you work on those pixels, and encodes the result on export. That means it can open anything the browser can decode, and it exports to the two formats that cover almost every practical job.

Formats the file tools handle

The tools are a separate pipeline from the editor. They convert, compress, resize and assemble files without opening them on a canvas, which is why they can handle PDFs and produce output formats the editor does not.

Choosing between the three web formats

For the web, three formats cover essentially every case. PNG is lossless and supports transparency, which makes it correct for screenshots, interface graphics, diagrams and logos. It is the wrong choice for photographs because a photographic PNG is often several times larger than a JPEG of the same picture. JPEG is lossy and has no alpha channel, which makes it correct for photographs and wrong for anything with hard edges or transparency. WebP sits between them: it can be lossless or lossy, it supports transparency, and at equal visual quality it is typically 25–35% smaller than JPEG, which is why most modern sites prefer it.

A simple decision rule covers most situations. If the image has transparency, use PNG or WebP. If it is a photograph and size matters, use JPEG or lossy WebP. If it is a screenshot or contains text that must stay sharp, use PNG. If it is a photograph that will be printed, use the highest-quality JPEG or a TIFF from a dedicated desktop tool, because WebP is not accepted by most print workflows.

What changes when you convert, and what you cannot get back

Converting from a lossless format to a lossy one discards information permanently. Converting back does not restore it: a JPEG opened and re-saved as PNG is a PNG that still contains JPEG artefacts. This is why the order of operations matters. Do all editing first, then export once to the final format, and keep the original untouched.

Transparency is the second one-way door. JPEG cannot store an alpha channel, so exporting a transparent PNG to JPEG forces the empty area to become a solid colour, usually white. If you later need the transparency back, you have to start from the original PNG. The same applies to animation: a GIF or animated WebP opened as a still becomes a single frame, and the other frames are not recoverable from that output.

Colour is the third. If a file carries an embedded ICC profile and a conversion drops it, saturated colours can shift, sometimes noticeably. For anything colour-critical, convert to sRGB first, compare before and after, and only then continue.

Formats this site does not handle, and where to go instead

Being explicit about the gaps is more useful than implying universal support. The editor does not open layered PSD, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF, RAW camera files or vector SVG, and it does not export WebP or PDF directly. For those formats, a full editor is the right tool — the Photopea reference documents exactly which of them Photopea opens and how faithfully, including the files and formats chapter on PSD fidelity and RAW import. For a quick conversion of a file you already have in a supported format, the tools on this site are faster than opening a full editor.