Convert WebP to PNG
Something has refused your .webp — an upload form, an older copy of Photoshop, a print shop, a template that only lists PNG — and you want the transparency and the exact pixels kept rather than flattened into a JPG. That is what this page is for. The PNG will be larger, often several times larger, and it will open in everything.
Nothing is uploaded. Every image stays in this browser tab —here is how that works.
Where the .webp on your desktop came from
Almost nobody sets out to save a WebP. You right-clicked a picture on a website, chose Save image as, and what landed in Downloads was a .webp — because the site serves WebP to any browser that says it can read one, and every current browser says that. The file is the image you were looking at. It is just wearing a format the next program in your day has never heard of.
Two shortcuts people try first, and neither works. Renaming the file to .png does nothing: the format is decided by the bytes at the start of the file, which still read RIFF…WEBP, and anything that matters reads those rather than the extension — so you get “the file could not be opened” a few seconds later than you would have otherwise. Screenshotting the image re-photographs it at your screen’s resolution, through your display’s colour, with whatever the screenshot tool compresses it into. Decoding the WebP and writing a real PNG is the only route that gives you the actual pixels.
Make sure PNG is the target you want
PNG is the right answer when the image has transparency to protect — a logo, an icon, a cut-out product shot — or when it is a screenshot, a diagram, or anything with text and hard edges that you may open and save again.
If it is a photograph, PNG is usually the wrong answer, and expensively so. Nothing in a photograph is transparent, and a lossless copy of one routinely runs ten times the size of the WebP it came from, for a picture nobody could pick out of a line-up against a JPG at quality 85. Send photographs to JPG and keep the megabytes for something that needs them.
The one number worth setting: a max file size
There is no quality dial for PNG, so when the output has to fit under a limit — an upload cap, an attachment, a CMS field — set a max file size and let the tool solve it. What it does is the only thing available to it: encode, measure, and if the result is over budget, shrink the picture by 10% and try again, up to six times, which takes it to a little over half the original width. If it still does not fit at that point you get the smallest version it managed along with a note that the target was missed, rather than something quietly oversized.
Read that setting as “the largest version of this image that fits under my number”, which is nearly always the question being asked.
Converting the twenty you saved this morning
Drop the whole folder in at once. Several run in parallel across your CPU cores, each output keeps its original name with _optimized.png on the end, and Download → Download as ZIP hands the lot back as one archive. Anything in the batch that is not a WebP is converted too — the card simply points out that it was not the format this page expected.
What changes when you convert WebP to PNG
Only the first frame is kept — Trade-off
The source can hold an animation and the output is a single still, so the first frame is converted and the rest are dropped. There is no warning at the point of use — the file simply stops moving — so if the motion mattered, a short muted MP4 or WebM is the format you are looking for, at a fraction of the size an animated GIF would be.
PNG is lossless from here on — Benefit
Whatever the image looks like going in is exactly what comes out, pixel for pixel, and it will stay that way through any number of further PNG saves. That makes it the right target for a master copy, a screenshot, or anything with text and hard edges — and the wrong one for a photograph you want to be small.
WebP files come in two kinds, and yours could be either — Note
WebP has a lossy mode and a lossless mode, and nothing on the outside of the file tells you which one you have — a screenshot saved from a browser is usually lossless, an image served by a website is usually lossy. If yours is lossy, the same "already-lost detail" caveat as JPEG applies.
The quality slider does nothing here — size comes from dimensions — Note
A lossless target has no quality dial to turn, so the slider is disabled and the only lever that moves the file size is how many pixels there are. Halving the width and height quarters the pixel count, which is almost always a bigger saving than any encoder setting would have been. Set a max width you actually need rather than shipping the original dimensions.
Camera and location metadata are not carried over — Note
EXIF is dropped: the camera model, the exposure settings, the timestamp, and — the one that matters — the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. That is a privacy improvement for anything you are about to publish and a loss if you were relying on it for cataloguing. Orientation is the exception: it is applied to the pixels, so the image stays the right way up.
Output is sRGB — Note
Everything this tool writes is in sRGB, the colour space the web assumes. That is what makes the result look the same in a browser, a chat app and a photo viewer without an embedded profile to carry around.
Questions people ask about this conversion
Does the transparency survive the conversion?
Yes, exactly. WebP and PNG both store a full 8-bit alpha channel, so a soft shadow or an anti-aliased edge arrives at the same precision it went in with. Nothing is flattened onto a background colour on the way through.
Why is the PNG so much larger than the WebP?
Because WebP was allowed to approximate and PNG is not. A lossy WebP encoder discards detail it judges you cannot see; PNG has to reproduce every pixel it is handed, including the fine texture and sensor noise in a photograph, which is the most expensive thing there is to store exactly.
Which programs actually refuse to open a WebP?
Fewer than there used to be — Windows, macOS and every current browser display them fine. The holdouts are older software and upload forms: Photoshop needed a plugin until version 23.2 in 2022, plenty of desktop viewers and editors from before 2020 were never updated, and a lot of web forms filter on the file extension against a list written years earlier.
Can I get back the original JPEG or PNG the site started with?
No. The WebP is what that server produced, and converting it gives you a PNG of the WebP — every compression decision made along the way is already baked into the pixels you have. If you need the true original, you have to ask whoever published it.
Related
Other things you can turn a WebP into
Try it with your own file
Drop an image in and see the result before you download anything.