What Is a WEBP Image, and Why Won't It Open Everywhere?
Saved a picture from a website and got a .webp file that won't open in your photo app or upload to a form? Here is what WEBP is, why sites use it, and how to convert it.
What WEBP is
WEBP (pronounced 'weppy', file extension .webp) is an image format developed by Google specifically for the web, first released in 2010. It can compress pictures either with some quality loss (like JPEG) or losslessly (like PNG), and it also supports transparency and animation. At a similar quality it is usually smaller than JPEG or PNG, which saves bandwidth -- the reason so many websites now serve their images as WEBP.
Both kinds use the same .webp extension, so you can't tell from the file name whether a WEBP is lossy or lossless. As our tests below show, that matters when you convert it.
Why you keep running into it, and why it won't open
When a modern browser visits a site, it is often served WEBP to make the page load faster. If you then right-click and Save image as, you get a .webp file. That is fine for the web, but older photo viewers, some office and design apps, and many upload forms don't accept WEBP, so the file you saved won't open or won't upload.
Converting it to JPG solves this: JPG is understood by essentially every program and every upload form.
Converting WEBP to JPG
Our WEBP to JPG converter turns WEBP files into standard JPGs in your browser, up to 20 at a time, at full size and quality 90. From our tests in October 2026: a still WEBP becomes an ordinary JPG with the same width and height; if the WEBP had transparent areas (JPG has no transparency) they are placed on a white background; and an animated WEBP is turned into a single still picture of its first frame.
Hidden photo details are handled the same way as in our other image converters. A test WEBP carrying GPS location came out without it, while the date taken and the camera make and model were kept.
| Test file | Result |
|---|---|
| Logo on a transparent background (600 x 600) | Background became white; the logo's own colours were unchanged |
| Animated WEBP, three frames (red, green, blue) | One still JPG of the first (red) frame |
| Photo-like image with GPS, date and camera details | GPS removed; date taken and camera make and model kept |
| Every test file | JPG had the same width and height as the WEBP |
Will the JPG be larger?
It depends on how hard the WEBP was compressed. Lossy WEBPs saved at an ordinary quality setting (we used 80, the default in Pillow, the imaging library our converter uses) got bigger as quality-90 JPGs in our tests: a photo-like image doubled in size, and a flat-colour banner with text grew about 2.4 times. Flat graphics stored losslessly grew even more -- about 7 to 8 times for our banner and logo -- because lossless WEBP compresses large plain areas extremely well.
A WEBP saved at very high quality, or losslessly, can go the other way: the same photo-like picture saved as a quality-95 WEBP got 42% smaller as a JPG, and from a lossless WEBP the JPG was about a ninth of the size. Either way the JPG is saved at full size and quality 90, where differences are hard to see; the change in file size mostly reflects how tightly the WEBP had been compressed.
| Test image | WEBP | JPG | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Photo-like, 1600 x 1200, lossy quality 80 | 133 KB | 264 KB | About 2 times larger |
| Same picture, lossy quality 95 | 632 KB | 370 KB | 42% smaller |
| Same picture, lossless | 3,221 KB | 366 KB | About a ninth of the size |
| Banner with text, 1200 x 630, lossy quality 80 | 34 KB | 83 KB | About 2.4 times larger |
| Same banner, lossless | 11 KB | 82 KB | About 7.7 times larger |
| Logo with transparency, 600 x 600, lossless | 3 KB | 22 KB | About 7 times larger |
Computer-generated test images; your own images will give different numbers.
After converting
If a site or form has a file-size limit and the JPG is too big, resize the image first. If you then need the images as one document, use our JPG to PDF converter. Your upload and the JPG are deleted from our server as soon as your download is ready.
How we tested
We generated the test images ourselves with Pillow, the imaging library our converter uses: a photo-like picture with fine detail saved as lossy WEBP at quality 80 and 95 and as lossless WEBP, a flat-colour banner with text, a logo on a transparent background, a three-frame animation, and a photo-like image carrying test GPS, date and camera details.
Each went through the same code as our WEBP to JPG tool, in a test copy of the site using Python 3.11 and Pillow 12.3.0 -- the version the live site uses -- and we measured the results with Pillow. The tests ran on our own test machine, not on the live server.