Convert BMP to JPG

Output is typically about 91% smaller.

Files stay on your device
No upload, no waiting
No sign-up, no watermark

or drag files here · processed on your device

Quality: 82

80 is visually lossless for most photos. Below 70, artefacts show in gradients.

Background

JPG has no transparency

How it works

Add your BMP file
Drag a BMP file onto the drop zone, or click to browse. You can select several at once.
Choose your settings
Adjust the quality slider if you want a smaller file or a sharper result. 80 suits most photographs.
Download the JPG
Conversion runs on your device as soon as each file is added — no upload, no queue. Download each result when it is ready.

All image tools

Questions

Is a scanned document better as JPG or PNG?

PNG, almost always. Scanned text and line art are exactly what JPEG handles worst — its compression creates faint halos around every letter, which is both ugly and harder for OCR software to read. PNG keeps the edges crisp, and on a mostly-white page it often produces a smaller file than JPEG anyway.

Will converting BMP to JPG make the file smaller?

Usually, yes. A 12-megapixel photo is around 36 MB as BMP and around 3.2 MB as JPG — about 91% smaller. Because JPG is a lossy format you can trade quality for size, so the exact result depends on the quality setting you pick.

Does converting BMP to JPG lose quality?

A little, by design. BMP is lossless and JPG is lossy, so some detail is discarded in exchange for a much smaller file. At quality 80–90 the result is visually indistinguishable from the original for photographs. For screenshots, logos or anything with sharp text, stay with a lossless format instead — lossy compression creates visible halos around hard edges.

What happens to transparent areas?

JPG has no alpha channel, so transparency cannot be preserved. Any transparent or semi-transparent pixels are composited onto a solid background — white by default — before encoding. If transparency matters, convert to PNG or WebP instead, both of which support it fully.

Why are BMP files so large?

BMP stores pixels essentially uncompressed — three or four bytes per pixel with no encoding at all. A 12-megapixel photo therefore lands around 36 MB, roughly 11× the same image as a JPEG. That simplicity is deliberate: legacy Windows software and embedded devices can read BMP with almost no code.

About bmp to jpg

Why people convert BMP to JPG

Same legacy source as BMP to PNG, but the destination is email, a photo library or anywhere that a 36 MB file is unwelcome.

JPEG if the content is photographic — a scanned photo, a camera capture. PNG if it is a screenshot, a document scan or anything with flat colour and text, where JPEG's artefacts show badly.

Worth knowing: This is the first lossy step for a file that has never been compressed, so pick the quality setting deliberately rather than accepting the default. Once you save the JPEG, that detail is gone.

BMP and JPG side by side

	BMP	JPG
Full name	Bitmap Image File	JPEG
Compression	Lossless	Lossy
Transparency	Yes — alpha channel	No
Animation	No	No
Browser support	Supported in all major browsers, though rarely used on the web	Universal — every browser, every device
Typical 12 MP photo	~36 MB	~3.2 MB
Usually used for	Legacy Windows applications, scanners and embedded displays	Photographs, email attachments and anything needing maximum compatibility

On a typical 12-megapixel phone photo, the JPG output comes out about 91% smaller than the BMP original. These are order-of-magnitude figures for one kind of image — your own results will vary a great deal, because flat colour, text and line art behave nothing like photographic detail, and the quality slider moves the figure substantially.

What to watch out for

Lossy — quality degrades a little every time you re-save
No transparency; transparent pixels are flattened to a solid colour
Visible ringing and blocking around sharp text and hard edges
Roughly 30% larger than WebP at matching visual quality
Transparency is lost. BMP supports an alpha channel and JPG does not, so transparent pixels are flattened onto a solid background colour. Pick the background above before converting, or convert to PNG or WebP instead.
This conversion is one-way. BMP is lossless and JPG is lossy, so detail discarded during encoding cannot be recovered by converting back. Keep the BMP original if you plan to edit the image later.

About the two formats

BMP stores pixels essentially uncompressed, which makes it enormous — a 12-megapixel photo lands around 36 MB, roughly 11× the same image as a JPEG. It persists mainly inside legacy Windows software, scanning utilities and embedded systems where decoding simplicity beats file size.

JPEG has been the default photo format for three decades, and its compatibility is unmatched — if a device can display an image at all, it can display a JPEG. The trade-offs are that it discards detail permanently on every save, and it has no transparency channel at all, so anything transparent becomes a solid background.

Other conversions

Everything runs on your device — nothing is uploaded, so there is no size limit, no queue and no copy left on a server afterwards. There is more on how browser-based conversion works if you want the detail. Otherwise, browse every image tool, or convert JPG back to BMP.