How To: Convert JPG to PNG

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to convert JPG to PNG image files. It’s a pretty easy process. In fact, the second part of the article should be fairly brief. Read on to learn more!

I should also mention that we’ll be learning how to convert JPG to PNG in the terminal. There are all sorts of GUI ways to do so, from individually converting files to batch conversions. Well, you can do all that in the terminal and this article will show you how.

Why PNG? Well, it supports lossless compression. PNG also supports transparency. PNG also looks better at higher resolutions, as it is able to display more details. Additionally, PNG not only supports lossless compression, it supports compression better – so you needn’t transfer larger files if you have no reason to do so. Plus, PNG is one of the better formats if  you’re going to do things like share the images online.

So, there are a number of reasons why you’d want to convert JPG to PNG. Fortunately, as I mentioned above, it’s really not all that difficult. You have tools to do this right in your default repositories, assuming you’re using a mainstream distro.

Without further ado…

Convert JPG to PNG:

As we’ll be converting in the terminal, you will have to have an open terminal. To do that, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. See? We’re off to a good start.

Now, the tool we’ll be using is ‘ImageMagick’ and it’s available to install via  your normal channels. If you were using a distro that uses apt (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/etc) then it’s trivial to install with:

sudo apt install imagemagick

Otherwise, install it with your default package manager tools. (You just might have installed when we covered how to resize images with ImageMagick. If not, now’s a good time to install it and then read that article!)

So, next you’ll either want to use the /path/to/directory where your JPG files are,  or just navigate to the directory where you’ve stored them (the easiest path), and you can convert them all with just one command:

mogrify -format png *.jpg

Congratulations, in just that one command you’ll have converted all the JPG to PNG files. Feel the power of Linux! You’ll retain the originals, just in case something goes awry. If you’re happy with the results, you can always delete the originals with any one of a number of commands.

So, what if you just want to convert one JPG to PNG? Well, that’s easy:

convert <file_name>.jpg <new_file_name>.png

See? I told you it was easy. While there’s a whole lot of complexity with ImageMagick, it can be quite simple to use for some very generic day-to-day tasks. Of couse, man imagemagick is always an option to learn more.

Closure:

Yup… It’s really not all that hard to convert JPG to PNG files with ImageMagick. If it’s a large number of files, it could be a bit for you to convert them all, but let it do its thing and it won’t take too long on a modern computer. If you only need to convert one image, that’s fine too.

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