Why do websites use WebP if it causes this much trouble?

Because it is roughly a quarter to a third smaller than JPG at the same visible quality, and page weight is money. A site serving a million images a day saves real bandwidth, and its visitors get pages that load faster on a phone. The trouble only starts when you take the file off the page and onto your desktop, which is not the case the format was designed for. From the site's point of view nothing has gone wrong at all.

Is WebP a Google format? Will it be abandoned?

Google developed it and released it under a BSD licence in 2010, and the reference tools are open source. It is not going anywhere: every major browser has supported it since 2020, and the images are already served by a large fraction of the web. If anything supersedes it the pressure will come from AVIF, which compresses better again, and even then WebP files will keep opening for decades in the same way GIF still does.

Can I just rename the file extension to .jpg?

No, and it will usually make things worse. The extension is a label; the bytes inside the file are still WebP. Software that reads the actual file header will report a corrupt JPG, and software that trusts the extension will fail in a more confusing way. The one place renaming does anything useful is when a site has served a WebP with a .jpg name already, in which case renaming to .webp lets your viewer identify it correctly.

Does converting a WebP make it worse?

Converting to PNG, no. Converting to JPG, a little. PNG is lossless, so it records exactly what the WebP decoder produced. JPG is lossy, so it applies a second round of compression on top of the one the WebP already went through. At quality 85 and above that second round is very hard to see on a photograph. Neither conversion can restore detail the WebP already discarded, because that detail is not written down anywhere in the file.

What about AVIF? I am getting those too.

Same story, one step further along. AVIF is newer, compresses better again, and desktop software support is several years behind where WebP's is now. The good news is identical: every current browser reads AVIF even when nothing else on the machine does, so the same browser-based route works. The difference is that no browser will write an AVIF, so converting away from it is easy and converting into it is not.

How to open a WebP file

What already opens one, what never will, the fix on every operating system, and why your browser is the most capable image tool on the machine.

Free toolImage ConverterPNG, JPG, WebP and AVIF, converted by the same codecs your browser uses to show them.Open the converter

The short answer

Drag it into a browser window. Every browser released since about 2020 opens a WebP instantly, with nothing to install. That single fact solves the problem for most people who arrive at this page, because the file is usually one they just want to look at.

If you need it in a format other software will take:

Windows 10 and 11: the built-in Photos app already opens WebP. Use Save as to get a JPG or PNG.
macOS Big Sur and later: Preview opens WebP. File, then Export, then choose the format.
iPhone and Android: the browser and the gallery both display it. Sharing it often converts it for you.
Anywhere at all: convert it in the browser you are already using, which is what this site does.

Why you have a WebP in the first place

Because you saved a picture from a website. WebP came out of Google in 2010, aimed squarely at making web pages lighter, and it is around 25 to 35% smaller than a JPG that looks the same. Once every browser supported it, sites had no reason not to serve it.

So you right-click, choose Save image as, and get a file your own computer then refuses. It feels like something went wrong. Nothing did. The site made a sensible decision about its bandwidth, and the format that decision produced happens to be one your desktop software never had a reason to learn.

The other routes in are screenshots on some Android builds, images exported from a CMS, and design handoffs where someone's export preset defaulted to WebP.

On Windows

It probably already works

Windows 10 gained WebP support in the Photos app through a 2019 update, and Windows 11 has it out of the box. File Explorer shows thumbnails for them too. If double-clicking a WebP opens Photos and shows the picture, you are done: use the three-dot menu, then Save as, and choose JPG or PNG.

If it does not

An older Windows 10 build may be missing the codec. The free WebP Image Extensions package in the Microsoft Store adds it, and unlike the HEVC extensions that HEIC files need, this one has never cost anything. After installing it, Photos and Explorer thumbnails both start working.

Paint, and the rest

Modern Paint opens WebP and can save as PNG, JPEG or BMP, which is enough for most quick jobs. The programs that will not are the old ones: Office 2016 and earlier, legacy scanner and printer utilities, and in-house software written before 2020. Those are not going to be fixed, so converting the file is the only route.

On a Mac

macOS has read WebP system-wide since Big Sur, in 2020. Preview opens it, Quick Look shows it when you press space in Finder, and Finder draws thumbnails. To convert, open the file in Preview, then File → Export, and pick JPEG or PNG from the Format menu.

For a folder full of them, Finder does it without Preview. Select the files, right-click, choose Quick Actions → Convert Image, and pick JPEG or PNG. It handles a few hundred files quite happily.

On an older macOS, or from a script, the sips command has been in the system for years:

sips -s format jpeg photo.webp --out photo.jpg

On a phone

Both iOS and Android display WebP in the browser and in the photo gallery, so viewing one is never the problem. The problem is handing it to an app that will not take it.

On iOS, sharing a saved WebP to most apps triggers a conversion on the way out, in the same way HEIC photos are converted when they leave the phone. The Shortcuts app has a Convert Image action if you want to do it deliberately, and it works in bulk from the Share sheet.

On Android, Google Photos will open a WebP and let you export it. Failing that, the browser route below works on a phone exactly as it does on a desktop, because the conversion runs in the browser rather than on a server.

In Photoshop and the design tools

Photoshop opened WebP natively from version 23.2, released in early 2022. Before that it needed the WebPShop plugin, which is still available on GitHub if you are on an older install and cannot upgrade. GIMP has supported WebP since 2.10, and Affinity Photo and Figma both handle it.

The awkward cases now are almost entirely outside design software: print shops running old RIP software, product marketplaces whose upload validators only ever learned JPG and PNG, and internal tools nobody has touched in a decade. Those will not change, and a converted file is the answer.

The Chrome trick worth knowing

You can often avoid getting a WebP at all. In Chrome, open the image on its own by right-clicking it and choosing Open image in new tab, then save from there. Many sites serve a JPG at the direct URL and only hand out WebP through the page markup, because the page can negotiate the format and a bare URL cannot.

It does not always work, and it depends entirely on how the site is set up. When it does, it saves you a conversion and gives you the file the site actually stores, rather than a copy that has been through an extra encoder.

Converting in the browser, and why that is the reliable route

Every method above depends on some particular piece of software being present and recent enough. The browser route does not, because reading WebP is the one capability every current browser is guaranteed to have. It is the reason a browser converter works on a locked-down work laptop where you cannot install anything.

On this site that is WebP to JPG for the smaller file, and WebP to PNG when the picture has transparency to keep. Both run entirely in the tab: the file is decoded by the browser's own reader and encoded again without ever being sent anywhere. That also means a folder of a hundred files converts as fast as your machine can work, with no upload to sit through.

Pick PNG if any part of the picture is see-through, or if it is a logo, screenshot or chart. Pick JPG if it is a photograph and you care about the file size. That is the whole decision.

AVIF, which is the same problem arriving early

AVIF is the next format down this road. It is built on the AV1 video codec, compresses photographs better than WebP by another 20 to 30%, and sites started serving it around 2022. Desktop software support is roughly where WebP's was in 2019: patchy, and improving slowly.

Everything above applies, with one important difference. Browsers read AVIF universally, so the browser route works exactly the same way, through the AVIF to JPG and AVIF to PNG pages. But no browser will write an AVIF, so converting into the format is not something any browser tool can honestly offer. It is a one-way door, and a site claiming otherwise is either shipping a very large encoder or quietly uploading your file.