JPG aur JPEG me farak kya hai — portal kyun reject karta hai
Same format, different extension length, and yet some uploaders reject one of them. What portals actually check, plus the HEIC and PNG traps behind it.
Updated
JPG and JPEG are the same thing. The format is called JPEG, after the committee that standardised it, and the three-letter spelling survives from an era when file extensions could only be three characters long. There is no difference in the data, the compression, or the quality.
And yet uploads are refused for this, which makes the question worth a page rather than a sentence.
What a portal can check, and what it usually does
An uploader has three ways to decide whether your file is acceptable.
The extension string. The cheapest check: read the characters after the last dot and compare them against a list. If the list was written as jpg,png and your file is named photo.jpeg, it fails. This is the mechanism behind almost every otherwise inexplicable format rejection, and it is entirely a programming shortcut rather than a rule about images.
The declared type. Browsers send a media type alongside the file. A file the browser labels image/jpeg passes a type check whichever extension it has.
The file's own contents. The thorough check: read the first few bytes and confirm the file really is a JPEG. Portals doing this care nothing for the name.
Because you cannot tell from outside which check a portal uses, the safe habit is simple: name the file with the extension the instruction text used. If the notice says JPG, call it photo.jpg. If it says JPEG, call it photo.jpeg. Renaming costs nothing and removes the entire class of problem.
Renaming is not converting
The dangerous half of this subject. Changing a file's extension from .png to .jpg does not convert it — the bytes are still a PNG, only now they are wearing a false label. A portal checking the extension will accept it and then fail to display it, and one checking the contents will reject it outright. Either way, the fault surfaces later and more confusingly than it needed to.
To convert, open the image in a tool and export it as JPEG. That re-encodes the pixel data into the JPEG format properly.
Why PNG causes byte rejections
PNG is lossless: it reproduces every pixel exactly. That is excellent for screenshots of text, line art, logos and anything with transparency, and terrible for photographs, because a camera image full of subtle noise gives the compressor nothing to exploit.
The practical consequence appears as a size problem rather than a format problem. A head-and-shoulders portrait that weighs thirty kilobytes as a JPEG can weigh three hundred as a PNG. Someone fighting to get a photograph under fifty kilobytes while it stays stubbornly heavy is very often fighting a PNG without realising it. Converting to JPEG solves the size problem in one step, and portals that specify JPG or JPEG are implicitly telling you they do not want a lossless file.
Where a portal explicitly permits PNG — and some do, for signatures on a transparent background — use it for that purpose only.
The HEIC trap, which is newer and worse
Recent iPhones save photographs as HEIC by default, an efficient modern format that no Indian government portal accepts. Worse, the file often looks like a normal photograph everywhere on the phone, so the problem only appears at the upload step, with an unhelpful message.
The fix is on the phone: in the camera settings, choose the most compatible capture format, which stores JPEG instead. For photographs already taken, share or export them through any route that converts to JPEG, or open them in a tool that re-encodes properly. WebP has the same issue for the opposite reason — it is common on the web and unsupported by these uploaders.
What official documents actually say
Portals are usually explicit about format even when they are vague about everything else. Banking recruitment specifies JPEG for the photograph and signature and PDF for supporting documents (IBPS CRP Clerks-XIV notification). The Indian electronic visa photograph specification asks for JPEG within a stated pixel and byte range (Indian e-Visa photo specification). The national scholarship portal's guidance accepts either PDF or JPEG for attached documents, each within a per-file cap (National Scholarship Portal FAQ). A teacher-training registration sheet asks specifically for JPG images at small byte sizes (UP D.El.Ed. image upload instructions).
Notice what none of them do: distinguish between JPG and JPEG as formats. They use whichever spelling the drafter preferred. It is the uploader's code, not the notice, that occasionally cares.
Colour depth and profiles, briefly
A few notices ask for a true-colour scan, meaning twenty-four-bit colour rather than a reduced palette or greyscale. This matters mainly if you scan a photograph in black and white mode by accident. Conversely, greyscale is your friend for document scans, where dropping the colour channels removes roughly a third of the file weight with no loss of readability.
Exotic colour profiles occasionally cause a photograph to appear washed out after upload. Exporting from a plain image tool rather than a professional editor avoids it, because the plain tool writes standard colour and nothing clever.
The short version
JPG and JPEG are one format. Name the file the way the instruction did. Never rename a PNG or HEIC to .jpg and hope. Convert properly, use JPEG for photographs and signatures, PDF for documents, greyscale for text scans, and check the extension one last time before you press upload.