Free Online Image Converters

 Our free online image converters can convert many file formats. Convert any image to most popular file formats like GIF, PNG, JPG, WebP, SVG, AVIF, BMP, TIFF or PDF. Find your favorite image converter here.

What are the image converters, and why should I use them?

The image converter converts images from one format to another. We use image converters, because sometimes when we download pictures, they come out corrupted or not showing properly on our computers. Image converter fixes these problems. Sometimes we need to upload an image to Instagram and other social media sites, and sometimes we need to make sure the picture is the right size before uploading. Two concepts can be included under the term size. For example, image size as area and size as data volume of the image file. This is where other types of converters, resizers and compressors come to the rescue.

What are the popular image formats, and what is important to know about them?

The most popular image formats are BMP, JPG, PNG and GIF. They all store images differently.

The abbreviation BMP stands for bitmap and the data stored in the file is arranged into rows and columns. The BMP image format is one of the first implementations for image encoding and there are different ways to encode bitmaps, which determines how many colors the image can contain. The bitmap compression defines colors with 8 or 4 bits-per-pixel. In practice, bitmap compression is inferior to some newer graphics file formats that support compression.

JPG stores the image as a series of pixels, while PNG uses a compression algorithm to reduce file sizes. GIF is just a simple animation. For example, PNG files are smaller than BMP files, but there is no way to tell whether the quality has been reduced. PNG is considered the best option because of its small file size and during the conversion process it can be converted without any loss of image quality. Our image converters are set by default to preserve 100% image quality.

Lossy and lossless compression algorithms

JPEG is the default file format for most digital cameras and for the web pages. JPEG is a compressed lossy graphic file format. That means that the JPEG image is saved with reduced file size at the expense of quality. Usually, the quality is reduced to 80% of the original image. The reason is to make the file smaller. The small files are sent and downloaded faster. The algorithm behind JPG image converter divides the image up into blocks of 8x8 pixels. Analyzes the data within each one of those blocks. Based on calculations, it decides which pixels are important. Then removes some of the non-important pixels. Depending on how much compression level is set, the algorithm discards some shades of any color since the difference between them is difficult to detect.

Lossless compression requires that data is not discarded or at least to be possible to recover it at the original state at the decoding stage. Lossless compression does not result in data degradation and decompressed (decoded) data is identical to the uncompressed image. The following graphic formats are considered as lossless - RAW, BMP, PNG, and AVIF supports lossless compression and lossy compression.

Learn more about sorting algorithms. Also take a look at our free online picture colorizer.