Format guides
File formats are full of decisions somebody else made for you — a camera that saves HEIC, a website that serves WebP, a quality slider defaulting to 80. These guides explain what those decisions actually do to your files, so the conversion you pick is a choice rather than a guess.
HEIC vs JPEG: Which Format Should You Use?
How Apple’s HEIC compares to JPEG for quality, size, and compatibility — and when converting makes sense.
Read the guide →WebP vs AVIF vs JPEG XL: Choosing a Modern Image Format
A practical comparison of the three modern image formats: compression, browser support, encode speed, and what to actually use.
Read the guide →Image Quality Settings Explained: What Does 80% Actually Mean?
What the quality slider really does, why 80 is usually the sweet spot, and why AVIF 55 looks like JPEG 85.
Read the guide →What Your Photos Reveal: EXIF Metadata and Privacy
GPS coordinates, timestamps, and device details hide inside your photos. What EXIF metadata is and how to strip it.
Read the guide →PNG vs JPEG: When to Use Each Format
Photos vs graphics, transparency, artifacts, and file size — a clear answer to the classic format question.
Read the guide →Containers vs Codecs: Why Your Video Won’t Play
MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM — the file extension describes the box, not the video inside. Understanding the difference explains almost every playback problem.
Read the guide →Camera RAW Explained: What’s Actually Inside a CR2, NEF, or ARW
RAW files are not images — they are sensor measurements waiting to be interpreted. What that means for editing latitude, colour, and converting to JPEG.
Read the guide →MP3, WAV, M4A and FLAC: Choosing an Audio Format
What lossy compression actually throws away, which bitrate is genuinely enough, and why converting between lossy formats costs you twice.
Read the guide →How File Conversion Works Without Uploading Anything
WebAssembly and WebCodecs let a browser tab run the same conversion engines a server would. What that means for privacy, speed, and the limits you will hit.
Read the guide →
Why we write these
Most format advice online is either a vendor telling you their format wins or a listicle that has copied the same three sentences since 2011. Neither helps when you are staring at a folder of .HEIC files that will not open. We write these from the same place the converter is built from: what the encoders actually do, what browsers actually support, and where the honest limitations are.
That includes telling you when converting is the wrong move. Re-encoding a lossy file into another lossy format costs quality every time, and plenty of format problems are better solved by changing what produced the file than by converting after the fact. Where that is the case, the guides say so.
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