What People Actually Upload to Image Tools: 36,038 Files, 29 Days
Original data from RoundCut: format share (JPG 57%, PNG 32%, AVIF 5%), file sizes (75% under 1 MB), HEIC on iOS, and how uploads differ by country and device.
Contents
Every image tool on the web publishes limits: 5 MB here, 20 MB there, “JPG, PNG and WebP only”. Almost none of them publish what people actually try to upload. We do have that number. Between August 10 and September 8, 2026, users picked 36,038 files on RoundCut and its sister site Araluma, and the telemetry recorded the real format of each file (read from its first bytes, not from the extension) and a size bucket. No file content, no file names, no personal data. This is what the pile looks like.
The short version
- 57% JPG, 32% PNG. WebP is 5.3% and AVIF 4.9%. HEIC, the iPhone camera format, is 0.5%. GIF and SVG are 0.1% each.
- 75% of files are under 1 MB. Only 3.5% pass 5 MB, 1.0% pass 10 MB and 0.3% pass 20 MB.
- iPhones almost never hand a HEIC to a web page. 3 of 6,243 files picked on iOS were HEIC. The web form gets a JPEG.
- AVIF uploads are a desktop thing, and a conversion thing. 8.0% of desktop uploads are AVIF against 0.1% on phones, and 94% of all AVIF files arrive at the converter, from people who want to get out of AVIF.
- The phone share swings from 16% in Japan to 61% in Indonesia. India is the only large market where PNG beats JPG.
Cite freely. The numbers file is at uploads-report-2026-09.json, and the method is at the end of this post.
Formats: JPG and PNG are 89% of everything
| Format | Files | Share |
|---|---|---|
| JPG | 20,548 | 57.0% |
| PNG | 11,540 | 32.0% |
| WebP | 1,897 | 5.3% |
| AVIF | 1,774 | 4.9% |
| HEIC | 191 | 0.5% |
| GIF | 46 | 0.1% |
| SVG | 25 | 0.1% |
Ten years of “next-generation formats” and the file people carry around is still a JPG or a PNG. WebP at 5% is real but small, and it skews toward files that were already downloaded from the web (WebP is what sites serve, not what cameras produce). AVIF at 4.9% looks surprising until you see where it comes from, below.
Sizes: three in four files are under 1 MB
| Size | Files | Share |
|---|---|---|
| under 1 MB | 26,470 | 74.8% |
| 1 to 2 MB | 4,361 | 12.3% |
| 2 to 5 MB | 3,341 | 9.4% |
| 5 to 10 MB | 886 | 2.5% |
| 10 to 20 MB | 218 | 0.6% |
| 20 to 25 MB | 50 | 0.1% |
| 25 to 50 MB | 64 | 0.2% |
| over 50 MB | 5 | 0.0% |
This is the table to keep next to any upload cap. A 5 MB limit, common on free tiers, turns away 3.5 files in 100. A 1 MB limit, which some compressors still ship, turns away one file in four. A 20 MB limit costs 0.3%.
The format changes the picture. 44% of PNG uploads are over 1 MB, against 18% of JPGs. A PNG is usually a screenshot or an export with transparency, and PNG has no lossy mode, so the same picture weighs three to five times more than its JPG. That is also why compressing a PNG tends to show the biggest before-and-after numbers.
HEIC: the format that never reaches the page
HEIC has been the default camera format on iPhones since 2017, and it is 0.5% of uploads. On iOS itself it is 0.05%: 3 files out of 6,243. The reason is not that people convert their photos. Safari on iOS converts a HEIC to JPEG on the fly when a page’s file picker does not list HEIC as accepted, so the web form receives a JPEG and the user never knows a conversion happened.
Where HEIC does show up is macOS (1.8% of Mac uploads) and, in small numbers, Windows and Android (0.5% each), where someone AirDropped or copied the original file and then dragged it into the browser. If you build an uploader, HEIC support matters for the desktop drag-and-drop path more than for the phone.
AVIF: a desktop format, and mostly a way out
| Device | Files | JPG | PNG | WebP | AVIF | HEIC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| desktop | 22,038 | 49.8% | 33.7% | 7.5% | 8.0% | 0.7% |
| mobile | 13,666 | 68.1% | 29.7% | 1.7% | 0.1% | 0.3% |
On a phone the upload is a photo, so it is a JPG. On a desktop, about one upload in six is a WebP or an AVIF, which means it came from the web, not a camera. And 1,668 of the 1,774 AVIF files (94%) were picked on the batch converter: users who received an AVIF that their software could not open and want a JPG or a PNG back. Almost nobody uploads an AVIF to crop or resize it.
France is the extreme case. 55% of French uploads are AVIF, and nearly all of them land on the converter. The French AVIF-to-JPG page ranks well, so the sample there is people leaving the format, not French photographers adopting it.
Country: the same two formats, a very different phone share
| Country | Files | Share of total | JPG | PNG | WebP | AVIF | From a phone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Indonesia | 3,067 | 8.5% | 64.2% | 31.8% | 2.2% | 0.1% | 60.6% |
| Thailand | 2,409 | 6.7% | 64.4% | 33.9% | 1.4% | 0.1% | 45.3% |
| United States | 2,161 | 6.0% | 60.1% | 32.2% | 3.1% | 2.8% | 53.0% |
| Brazil | 2,101 | 5.8% | 60.4% | 36.4% | 1.5% | 1.4% | 32.4% |
| Germany | 2,011 | 5.6% | 66.9% | 22.9% | 1.7% | 6.8% | 38.4% |
| India | 1,804 | 5.0% | 44.8% | 50.0% | 4.4% | 0.2% | 42.7% |
| Japan | 1,510 | 4.2% | 46.6% | 42.1% | 1.2% | 10.0% | 15.8% |
| Egypt | 1,334 | 3.7% | 69.6% | 28.3% | 1.7% | 0.2% | 53.4% |
| Vietnam | 1,218 | 3.4% | 66.0% | 32.0% | 1.9% | 0.1% | 45.0% |
| China | 1,158 | 3.2% | 52.2% | 31.3% | 9.8% | 4.8% | 17.1% |
Two things stand out. India is the only large market where PNG beats JPG, and the split is by device: Indian desktop users upload PNG 57% of the time. Screenshots of documents, forms and chats are the likely reason. And the phone share is not about how rich a country is. The United States sits at 53% mobile with Egypt and Indonesia, while Japan (16%) and China (17%) do this kind of work on a desktop.
What the tool tells you about the file
| Tool | Files | Most common format | Second |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circle crop | 23,659 | JPG 64.2% | PNG 32.6% |
| Batch convert | 4,917 | AVIF 33.9% | JPG 25.7% |
| Background remover | 2,656 | PNG 50.5% | JPG 44.8% |
| Resize | 1,477 | JPG 48.5% | PNG 47.3% |
| Crop | 1,188 | JPG 65.9% | PNG 31.4% |
| Upscale | 944 | JPG 66.6% | PNG 27.9% |
| Compress | 860 | JPG 61.6% | PNG 32.3% |
Profile pictures are photos, so circle crop is two-thirds JPG. Background removal is the one tool where PNG leads, because half of its input is already a product shot or a logo with a clean edge. The compressor sees the highest HEIC share of any tool (2.8%), which is the desktop drag-and-drop path described above.
Method
- Where the data comes from. roundcut.app and araluma.com, two free image-tool sites with the same telemetry, August 10 to September 8, 2026 (29 days, the whole period since the size bucket was added). 36,038 file picks, 35,395 of them with a size bucket.
- What is recorded. At the moment a file is picked, the format detected from the file’s first bytes (magic numbers, not the extension or the declared MIME type), a size bucket (under 1 MB, 1 to 2 MB, and so on), the tool, the interface language, and the edge-derived country, device class and operating system. Nothing about the file’s content, name or exact size is stored, and no cookies or fingerprints are involved.
- What it is not. Two sites, one category, one month. It describes what reaches a free consumer image tool, not the web, and it is biased by what ranks where: the French AVIF number is the clearest example.
- Reproducibility. The extraction and the charts come from one script run against the raw event store. The output is the JSON linked above. We plan to re-run it every six months and keep the earlier editions online.
