Why do so many “transparent images” online have those fake transparent backgrounds? It doesn’t benefit anybody
In: 25
If you’re referring to the grey and white chequered pattern, it’s not really the background of the image. It’s what happens when a website tries to render a transparent PNG image without knowing it’s a transparent PNG.
I couldn’t be specific on the details without researching (I’m sure someone else will chime in), but if you look at a transparent PNG in the windows photo viewer, you’ll see it has a black background. If you tell a website to display an image, without stipulating that it’s transparent, it will show the chequered pattern background.
Transparent images only tend to work if the application displaying them knows that it’s meant to be transparent.
To compound the problem – when you’re looking at search engine image results, they’re all cached from elsewhere. So a ligitimate transparent PNG from a stock image site, gets represented with a JPEG thumbnail cached by the search engine. How does software show a transparent background in a JPEG? It shows that chequered pattern. If you right click and “save image”, you’re getting the jpeg, not the png you really want.
Latest Answers