What Is a WebP File?

You right-clicked an image, hit Save image as…, and got a file ending in .webp. Now Photoshop won't open it, your CMS rejects the upload, and the person you emailed it to says it's broken.

Nothing is wrong with the file. WebP is a normal, modern image format — it is just newer than the software complaining about it. This guide explains what a WebP file actually is, why the web quietly switched to it, and the fastest way to turn one back into a JPG or PNG when you need to.

In a hurry? Drop it into WebP to JPG and you'll have a universally-accepted file in about two seconds. It converts inside your browser, so the image is never uploaded anywhere.

WebP is an image format Google released in 2010 and pushed hard from about 2020 onward. It does the same job as JPG and PNG — store a picture — but with a more modern compression engine borrowed from video encoding.

The practical difference is that WebP replaces both of the old formats at once. JPG can compress photos small but cannot do transparency. PNG does transparency and razor-sharp text but produces huge files for photographs. WebP does all of it in one format:

• Lossy compression — like JPG, for photographs
• Lossless compression — like PNG, for logos and screenshots
• Transparency (alpha channel) — like PNG, and it works in lossy mode too, which PNG cannot do
• Animation — like GIF, but far smaller

That last pair is why publishers adopted it. A transparent logo that also compresses like a photo was impossible before WebP.

A .webp file is a RIFF container — the same wrapper style as .wav audio. If you open one in a hex editor the first bytes read RIFF, then the file size, then WEBP. That's the signature programs check, whatever the extension says.

You did not change a setting. The website did.

Most large sites now store one master image and let their CDN hand out whichever format your browser advertises support for. Your browser sends a header saying Accept: image/webp, the server takes that as permission, and sends WebP. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all advertise it, so almost everyone gets WebP now.

That negotiation was designed for displaying images, not saving them. When you right-click and save, you get whatever the browser was handed — which is the WebP, not the original JPG the site started with. WordPress compounds this: it has handled WebP since version 5.8, and most performance plugins and managed hosts now auto-generate WebP copies, so even sites that uploaded JPGs end up serving WebP.

There is no browser setting to turn this off. The fix is on the other end — convert after you save.

You can almost certainly open it already. Support arrived years ago in most software; people assume otherwise because one program refused.

Opens WebP natively today: every current browser, Windows 10 and 11 Photos, macOS Preview and Finder Quick Look, Google Drive, Google Photos, Figma, Canva, GIMP, Affinity Photo, and Photoshop 2022 and newer.

Still refuses: older Photoshop (2021 and earlier, without a plugin), Microsoft Office in most versions, a lot of print shops and photo-lab upload forms, older Android and iOS apps, and plenty of job-application and government upload portals that whitelist .jpg and .png by extension.

The single most reliable way to open a WebP anywhere, on any device: drag it into a browser tab. Every browser renders it. If you only need to look at the image, you're done.

If a specific program has to accept the file, converting is the only real answer. A viewer plugin won't help when the barrier is an upload form checking the file extension.

Use WebP to JPG for maximum compatibility, or WebP to PNG if the image has a transparent background you need to keep.

1. Open the converter — WebP to JPG or WebP to PNG.
2. Drag your .webp in, or click Browse Files to pick it.
3. Set the quality slider if you're going to JPG. 90 is the default and is fine for almost everything. PNG has no slider — it's lossless by definition.
4. Click Convert Image. It runs on your own machine and finishes in about a second.
5. Download the result.

Nothing is uploaded. The conversion runs in your browser using the same image engine that renders the page, which is why it works offline once the page has loaded and why the file never touches a server.

Converting a folder of them? Image Converter handles JPG, PNG and WebP in any direction, and running twenty files locally is faster than waiting for a single upload queue elsewhere.

This is the mistake worth avoiding, and it is not obvious.

PNG cannot compress photographs. When you convert a photographic WebP to PNG, the picture is stored losslessly and the file grows enormously. We measured it on a real 1200×800 photograph:

So the rule is simple:

• Photograph, or anything with a solid background → convert to JPG. Same size, universally accepted.
• Logo, icon, screenshot, or anything with a transparent background → convert to PNG. Transparency survives; JPG would fill it with white.

If you convert a transparent image to JPG, the see-through areas come out solid white. That's not a bug — JPG has no alpha channel and never has. Our converter fills white deliberately, because the alternative is black.