February 12, 2026, 10:14pm 1

I have been trying to troubleshoot the issue where PNGs are uploaded as JPEGs and everyone mentions these File settings (below)

but when I navigate through all my File settings, this doesn’t come up and searching for ‘quality’ also does not bring up any results.

Is this a limitation with the type of account you have or a feature you need to switch on?

This is now a hidden site setting

For reference the reason why it was hidden^[1]:

In our efforts to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and discoverability of site settings, we’re hiding overly technical settings that few users override.

1. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/35197 ↩︎

Someone does. You could ask them to change it.

Why has this been made hidden? It makes it impossible to share .png files via Discourse. I struggle to see how this is a ‘feature’.

It hamstrings using Discourse as a repository of .png files, and means reverting to email / Google Drive / some other platform for the pedestrian task of sharing images with a transparent background.

This seems quite nuts to me. At least I’m self-hosted, and can change this quite easily.

Most modern browsers now support WebP. If you’re looking to save storage space, converting PNG images to WebP today might be a good option.

In the past, storage space was a bigger concern. Today, server storage capacity is growing significantly, so there may be no need to compromise image quality just to save space.

On mucking about with it, I see that only .png files without transparency are converted to .jpg - now that makes more sense!!!

So maybe this is actually pretty sweet and I’ll turn that setting back on.

Hello, could you please let me know where to set this?

I tested uploading a transparent PNG, and it was automatically converted to JPEG.

Maybe I got that observation wrong then - it seemed to be the case, but I didn’t test it in detail.

The setting referred to above is a Hidden Site Setting. See this post: