Hello. The PNG merge job arrives more often than people expect: the screenshot fragments that need reassembly, the map tiles for a print, the layered design exports that must become one file, the scanned pages that belong in a single document image. Merging PNGs sounds trivial until the requirements arrive — no quality loss, transparency preserved, exact pixel alignment — and the wrong tool quietly re-encodes everything into mush. Here's what a proper merge preserves, the layout patterns that cover most needs, and the workflow that keeps quality untouched. Why PNG Deserves Its Reputation — and Its Care PNG is a lossless format: every pixel survives compression mathematically intact, and the alpha channel carries per-pixel transparency. That's why it's the format of screenshots, logos, line art, and anything with sharp edges or see-through regions. It's also why careless merging shows: tools that decode and re-encode through a lossy format (JPEG intermediates are the classic crime) inject compression artifacts into content that was pristine, and tools that flatten transparency against a white background permanently bake a backdrop into logos that needed none. The rules of a quality merge: PNG in, PNG out; transparency either preserved against a chosen background or carried through untouched; dimensions handled in exact pixels — no silent resizing, no DPI reinterpretation. The Three Layouts That Cover Nearly Everything Merge jobs sort into three patterns. Horizontal strip: images placed side by side at a shared height — film strips, comparison pairs, timeline sequences. The tool aligns by top edge or by vertical center, and unequal heights leave honest whitespace rather than stretching. Vertical stack: images joined top to bottom at a shared width — the chat-screenshot archive, the scanned pages, the step-by-step tutorial capture. Width matching matters here: images of differing widths pad or scale to a chosen standard,