What image formats are best for email (JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG)?

You're building an email and you've got a photo of your product, a logo, an animated GIF, and some icons. Should you use JPEG for all of them? Or PNG? What about SVG? The format you pick affects file size, rendering quality, and whether your client's email software even supports it.

Choice depends on content type. JPEG works best for photographs and complex images with many colors. The format uses lossy compression, which shrinks file size dramatically without making photos look bad to human eyes. You're trading tiny quality loss for significant file size savings. PNG is your choice for graphics, logos, and any image needing transparency. It's lossless, which means zero quality loss. The trade-off. PNG files are bigger. When you need animation, GIF is still the standard. It's limited to 256 colors, so it's not great for photos, but perfect for simple animated sequences or graphics with few colors.

SVG is the vector format. It scales infinitely without pixelation, which sounds amazing. The problem. Most email clients don't support SVG reliably. Outlook won't render it. Many mobile clients block it. Only use SVG if you know your audience uses Gmail, Apple Mail, or other clients with solid SVG support.

And one One more thing. Every image you include adds file size to your email. Larger emails load slower, especially on mobile with slower connections. Optimize your images before adding them to email. Use tools to compress your files while keeping quality high. Your recipients will appreciate emails that load fast. Always add alt text to images so content survives blocking.