Convert WebP images to JPG or PNG

Why you ended up with a WebP

WebP is Google's image format, and on the web it has largely won. It compresses roughly 25–35% smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality, does lossless compression like PNG, supports transparency, and can hold animation like a GIF. For a website paying for bandwidth, that combination is irresistible — so a great many sites now serve WebP to any browser that says it can display one.

Which is where you come in. Your browser can display it perfectly, so the page looks fine, and "Save image as…" hands you exactly what the server sent: a WebP. The format that was chosen to make the page load faster becomes your problem the moment you try to use the file for anything else.

What actually refuses to open it

Browsers are unanimous in supporting WebP, which is precisely why the gap is so easy to walk into — everything you see it working in is a browser. Outside one, support is patchy in a way that has more to do with age than with any particular vendor. Photoshop only gained native WebP support in 2022; installations older than that need a plugin. Long-lived desktop software, older Office installs and the image import dialogs of print and design tools frequently do not list it at all.

The most common wall, though, is an upload form. Job application portals, government e-filing systems, insurance claim forms, print-on-demand services and photo labs tend to validate uploads against a fixed list — usually JPG, PNG and PDF — and that list was written before WebP mattered. No amount of local software support helps you there. You need a JPG.

JPG or PNG?

If the image is a photograph, choose JPG. It is what upload forms expect, it is small, and photographic content is exactly what JPEG compression was designed for.

If the image is a logo, icon, screenshot, or anything with a transparent background, choose PNG. JPG has no transparency at all — the alpha channel does not survive the conversion, and transparent areas come out as flat white. PNG also avoids the smearing JPEG produces around hard edges and text, which is very visible on a screenshot and invisible on a landscape.

The tool checks the file's header when you add it and warns you if it contains transparency while JPG is selected, so this is not a decision you have to make blind.

Animated WebP files

A WebP can hold an animation, and neither JPG nor PNG can. If you convert one you will get a single still image — the first frame — and nothing else. That is a real limitation rather than an oversight: turning frames into an animated GIF is a different job that needs a different encoder.

Because losing an animation silently is a genuinely annoying way to waste ten minutes, the tool reads the container header of every file you add and labels the animated ones in the list before you press convert.

About quality

Most WebP files on the web are lossy, which means detail was already discarded when the site encoded them. Converting to JPG compresses a second time, on top of that. The quality slider controls only how much the second pass takes — it cannot recover anything the first one removed.

This is also why converting to PNG does not improve anything. PNG is lossless, so it preserves the WebP's pixels perfectly, artefacts and all, in a file several times larger. Lossless is a promise about what happens from here on, not a repair.

The default of 0.9 is high enough that the second compression is very hard to see. Push it to 1 and you mostly buy file size.

Questions

Is anything uploaded?

No. The decoding and re-encoding both happen in this page using your browser's own image pipeline. Nothing is sent to a server, which is also why the tool keeps working if you go offline after loading it.

How many files can I convert at once?

As many as your device's memory allows — there is no fixed cap. Each image is held decoded while it is converted, so on a phone it is worth working in batches of a few dozen rather than a few hundred. Convert more than one and a "download all as ZIP" button appears.

What happens to the metadata?

It is not carried over. Browsers re-encode from decoded pixels and write nothing else, so any EXIF, GPS coordinates or colour profile in the original is dropped as a side effect of how the conversion works. Usually that is what you want; if you are archiving and need the capture dates, keep the originals.

Can I convert a JPG into a WebP here?

Not on this page — it goes one way, out of WebP. Converting into WebP is an optimisation you do for a website you run, which is a different enough job to deserve its own tool rather than a checkbox here.

How do I stop getting WebP files in the first place?

You mostly cannot, because the site chooses the format, not you. Two things help. Some sites keep the original JPEG at a slightly different URL, so opening the image in its own tab and looking at the address is sometimes enough. Alternatively, right-click and use "Copy image" rather than "Save image as…": that puts decoded pixels on the clipboard, and pasting into any editor gives you something you can save in whatever format you like.