Why does it seem everyone saves graphics in PNG format now?

I swear that it seems many sites even save photographs and stuff in PNG format. Is there a reason for this, like some script that automatically converts uploaded images to PNG format, or have people stopped using any other image formats for whatever reason?

 

PNG is popular because of how it treats images. JPEG for example decompresses the images and makes grainy images in exchange for filesize. PNG has a higher resolution output, so most images you create in photoshop or any other graphics design program will be output in the resolution of choice. And, on top of that, it allows for transparency, which is something a lot of the other formats don't have.

This transparency is apparent if you look at the bottom of this page.... The outer curves are transparent outside of the orange box. Resulting in being able to embed 2 different images that look like a single image.

I took graphic design in college, and each filesize has it's place. GIF is just as "powerful" as PNG, but the only thing it serves a purpose is for animated images. The other file formats are designed for the respective companies [or insitutions for that matter] that want the image to behave in a certain way. For example, paintings require a much, much higher resolution than the PNG format. MUCH higher.

The file size I saw paintings go for was over 20MB to a gig.

 

Most webmasters use .PNG's because they allow image transparency, but in a much greater quality than .GIF's. .JPG's are meant to be for large photos only (the ones you take with your camera, for instance) and .GIF's are used (mostly) for animated images.

 

Problem is, I also see a lot of sites using the PNG format for photos, which makes the file size about ten times bigger for no real justifiable reason.

Is it really worth having ultra long loading times just for a tiny amount more quality?

 

I use PNG primarily for its transparency and secondarily for its relatively reduced size when using the flattened PNG but I use JPEG as much as I use PNG. Although, I use JPEG mainly for pictures taking with camera and sometimes some I made with an image editor and GIF for animated images. However, I think people use PNG on websites mainly to take advantage of its transparency but I use any depending on what I think would do it best.

 

People seem to think PNG's quality will attract enough users. It's one of those "Yes and no" scenarios: Yes, that's true and no, it's not entirely the pivotal reason why people come to your site kind of thing.

 

Not to be a smart ass, but PNG is an acronym of Portable Network Graphics, and it was designed to be portable across many computer systems. To top it off with some whipped cream, it was designed by The People™, not individual organizations or corporations. Hence, It's a Good Thing™ to use PNG format.

 

I save my images in PNG format because I like to have my images with transparent backgrounds, because it makes it easier to work with the images.

 

The PNG supports transparency. That is the biggest plus point for them. The GIFs too support transparency no doubt, but they have some different color resolution and maybe this is one reason why they are losing out their takers.

 

I use PNGs since they support transparency and provide better results than GIFs. However I don't use them for photos since they increase the file size in a disproportionate way. JPEGs are still the best choice for photos in my opinion.

 

^ This I use pngs whenever I can. I find it to be the best quality for the image depending on what the images are for (non-animated)

 

The main reason is the transparency that PNG support and JPEG doesn't support. When it comes to designing websites, transparency does play an important role.

 

Ever since I first started designing, I've always used the PNG format in saving my design. I chose to use it primarily because it supports transparent backgrounds. I also find that saving in PNG has a better look at the image itself compared to JPEG.

 

As said above there are many pros of using PNG format (alpha transparency, the data size of PNG can be smaller for image which uses lots of colors and is huge and the quality of PNG is superior) however, I don't think other formats like JPG are now used less. I still use it a lot for pictures that do not need to be superB quality as it lets me to apply more compression and to reduce the size of image data significantly. GIFs are still good for small elements and animated icons.

 

PNG is a much better format compared to GIF. It also has great quality at good compression ratios. It's specially suited for graphics but some people also use it for photography. I tend to save photos in PNG format because sometimes I get better quality than using JPEG.

Another reason to use PNG in favor of GIF is that GIF is a propietary format and PNG has open specifications.

 

The ability to do transparency as others have said is why I usually save mine as pngs. also a program I used to use and forget the name of saved everything as pngs. That could be why there's an increase in pngs if the program is popular.

although I can't for the life of me remember the name of it...

 

I think because .PNG is the most common and popular one out of them all.
As for my forum, as the default, they've been using .GIF's for their images, but if you put it on a dark background, you can see rough white edges on the images, but I think if you put it in the .png format, it allows transparency much better than .Gif

 

PNG makes an image lightweight and most importantly, transparent. Transparency is the key in web programming, and hence the format.

 

Personally I use PNG because it makes the images more of a higher quality like many above me has said, it provide a better image then say saving it as a jpeg or some other sort of format. Myself and a lot of others I know after working in Photoshop tend to save it only as . png and nothing else. When creating images and things that you are going to use for a website or whatever else you will want to have a higher quality image for a better representation, I rather have quality then not when creating things for my website or for even another. So that is why many favor PNG rather then some other type of format, hope you have learned a lot from this thread

 

PNG is actually not the highest quality format. TIFF, for example, is much higher quality.
PNG is also not the only format which supports transparency.
PNG is popular because it works across all of the major graphics programs, from Adobe to GIMP to Paint to Corel to Inkscape to Blender to Maya to you name it.
The same cannot be said for JGP, MPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, etc.