Best Free Ways to Convert BMP to JPG.
Do you have a BMP image that you want to convert to JPG / JPEG? There are many different ways to convert between different image formats and in this post I will mention the simplest and easiest ways I know.
You really don’t see that many BMP or Bitmap images these days because it’s not optimized for color images with transitions or gradients. BMP is a really old format, it was the default file format for Paint in Windows XP. Technically speaking, it is lossless, but with little or no compression.
Lossless means the image can be reduced, but without loss of quality. However, since BMP is not compressed, the file sizes are huge. A simple image with several colors can be hundreds of kilobytes in BMP format, but only 2 to 3 KB in JPEG format. This is why BMP is no longer used on the Internet.
On the other hand, JPEG is a lossy and highly compressed format. This means that the file sizes will be much smaller, but quality will be lost every time you save. JPEG is great for detailed color photographs, but poor for logos and simple line art. This is why most logos are saved in GIF format.
Finally, BMP and JPEG support up to 16 million colors, so any image you convert from BMP to JPEG should look pretty much the same. Anyway, now that you know a little about the two image formats, let’s talk about converting BMP to JPEG.
Microsoft Painter
If you’re still not using Windows XP (and you shouldn’t be using it), you can use Microsoft Paint to open the BMP file and quickly save it as a JPG file.
Open Paint and then open the BMP file. Then click “File” and then “Save As”. In the new Ribbon version of Paint, click the little menu icon.
From the Save as type drop-down list, select JPEG as the file format. That’s literally all you need to do to convert BMP to JPG format.
If you’re using a computer or device that doesn’t have Paint installed, there are other options, which I mention below.
Convert photos online
If you prefer to use an online conversion tool, there are some good options. Luckily, I’ve already written about converting between different file formats using two popular online tools: Zamzar.com and Online-Convert.com.
These sites allow you to convert between hundreds of different formats, but in our case, we only need to convert between two image formats.
I like online-convert.com better because it gives you a lot of options. You can select a file on your computer, paste a URL, or even get an image from Dropbox. You can also select quality settings for the JPEG file, resize, change color, enhance the image, and change the resolution.
Just click “Convert File” and after a few seconds the JPEG file download will start automatically. ZamZar is also easy to use, but you have to provide them with your email address and they will email you the file. This usually works fine, but there are times when you only receive an email after a couple of hours or any email at all.
Free third-party program
If you are looking for free BMP to JPG converter, you also have several options. Easy2Convert has a small freeware program written specifically for this type of conversion.
The free version allows you to select one BMP file, output folder and adjust the image quality. They also have a PRO version that allows you to batch convert BMP to JPG, but it costs $ 20 and probably not worth it unless you do it all the time.
The free program also has built-in command line support, so if you are familiar with its use, you can create a batch script to batch convert many files at once.
If that doesn’t work for you, try BMP to JPG Converter, another free software that has some really useful features. First, it lets you convert for free in batch, so that’s good. The second useful feature is the ability to scan a folder and all its subfolders for BMP files.
This can be really useful if you have a folder with a bunch of different types of files and don’t want to manually move them all to a separate directory. You can also select the quality for JPEG output and then click the “Start” button to start the conversion process.
It’s all about different ways to go from BMP to JPG format without too much hassle and cost. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
–