You saved an image from a website, got it from a colleague, or exported from a tool — and now it won't open. Or it opens in Chrome but not in your email client. Or you uploaded it to a platform and got a format error. The file extension is .webp, and it's causing problems everywhere.
This happens because WebP is a web-first format designed for browser performance, not universal compatibility. It's genuinely better than JPEG for web use — but outside the browser, support is patchy enough to cause real workflow problems.
WebP is an image format developed by Google, released in 2010, and based on the VP8 video codec. The core idea was straightforward: take a modern video compression algorithm and apply it to still images. Video codecs had become extremely good at compressing complex visual content with minimal visible quality loss — applying that technology to photos and graphics should produce much smaller files than JPEG or PNG.
It worked. WebP's compression engine considers a wider area of surrounding pixels when encoding each block, uses more sophisticated prediction modes, and handles gradients more cleanly than JPEG's block-based discrete cosine transform. The result is that a WebP file can be 25–35% smaller than a comparable JPEG at equivalent visual quality.
WebP also solved the format fragmentation problem that existed between JPEG (no transparency) and PNG (transparency but large file sizes). A single WebP file can be either lossy or lossless, and supports a full alpha channel for transparency — making it potentially a replacement for both formats in web contexts.
The comparison isn't close on the technical metrics. WebP consistently outperforms JPEG in every measurable way for web-delivered images:
For a webpage that needs to load quickly on mobile, WebP is the obvious choice. Google has promoted it aggressively through PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals scoring — serving WebP instead of JPEG directly improves Largest Contentful Paint times, which affects search rankings.
Browser support for WebP is now essentially universal — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and all mobile browsers have supported it for years. The problem is everywhere else.
| Context | WebP Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Modern web browsers | Yes | Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge — all supported since 2020 |
| Gmail (web) | Yes | Displays inline WebP attachments |
| Outlook (desktop) | No | Shows broken image icon for inline WebP |
| Apple Mail | Partial | macOS 12+ and iOS 14+ render WebP; older versions don't |
| No | Cannot send or display WebP images | |
| Telegram | Partial | Stickers use WebP; regular images require JPEG/PNG |
| Instagram (upload) | No | Rejects WebP uploads — requires JPEG or PNG |
| Twitter / X | No | Serves WebP to browsers but rejects WebP uploads |
| Partial | Displays but doesn't accept uploads | |
| Adobe Photoshop | Yes | Supported since version 23.2 (2022) |
| Adobe Lightroom | No | Cannot import WebP files as of 2026 |
| Affinity Photo | Yes | Full import and export support |
| GIMP | Yes | Full support since GIMP 2.10 |
| Windows Photos | Yes | Supported on Windows 10/11 with the WebP codec installed |
| macOS Preview | Yes | Supported since macOS 12 Monterey |
| Microsoft Word / PowerPoint | No | Cannot embed WebP images directly |
| Google Slides / Docs | Yes | Supports WebP since 2022 |
| Canva | Partial | Can display but not reliably upload WebP |
| Print / RIP workflows | No | RIP software expects JPEG, TIFF, or PDF |
The pattern is clear: the web ecosystem has largely moved to WebP, but the broader software world — email, messaging, Office tools, social media uploads, print workflows — still treats JPEG as the universal standard.
Don't convert WebP to JPEG reflexively. WebP is a better format for web use, and if your images are only ever displayed in a browser, there's no reason to convert. But here are the scenarios where converting is the right move:
You generally do not need to convert for: displaying on a website, using in a modern design tool (Figma, Sketch, Affinity Photo, Photoshop), using in Google Workspace, or when the image will stay within a web-only workflow.
JPEG quality is a scale from 1 (maximum compression, worst quality) to 100 (minimum compression, best quality). The number doesn't map linearly to file size — the relationship is more like a curve where the largest gains come from dropping from 100 to 85, and diminishing returns set in below 70.
The number 92 appears frequently as a default for good reason. It sits at the knee of the quality/size curve — you're preserving essentially all perceptible detail while avoiding the large file sizes of 95+. Most image editors, including Photoshop and Lightroom, use 80–92 as their default JPEG export quality.
A practical approach: start at quality 85 and look at the result at the actual display size your image will be used at. If it looks good (which it almost always does for photos), that's your setting. Only increase to 92–95 if you see visible artefacts, or if the image will be re-edited after conversion.
Some WebP files contain transparency — a logo with a transparent background, a graphic with soft-edge transparency, an image with a partially transparent shadow. When you convert these to JPEG, there's a problem: JPEG has no alpha channel and cannot store transparency at all.
Every conversion tool has to make a decision about what to do with transparent pixels. The most common default is to fill them with white. But "correct" depends entirely on how the image will be used:
If you have a logo that's designed to sit on a blue (#1e3a8a) background and you fill the transparent areas with white, the JPEG will look broken when placed on that blue surface — you'll see a white rectangle around the logo instead of a clean overlay.
If your image has soft-edge transparency (like a drop shadow with gradual feathering), be aware that no background fill will look as clean as the original WebP transparency. The feathered edge that smoothly blends into the page background in the WebP will become a hard transition in the JPEG. For these cases, consider whether PNG might be a better output format — PNG preserves the alpha channel and is nearly as universally supported as JPEG.
This surprises people. You download a 45 KB WebP file, convert it to JPEG at quality 92, and the JPEG comes out at 68 KB. That feels wrong — you ran a conversion and the file got bigger.
It's not a bug. It's the expected result. WebP was designed to be more efficient than JPEG, and the WebP encoder may have been tuned aggressively for the web. When you re-encode that content as JPEG, you're using a less efficient codec, so the file is larger at equivalent quality.
The scale of the difference depends on the image content and the original WebP quality setting:
If file size is the primary concern and you're outputting for web use, reconsider whether you need to convert at all. If you're converting for compatibility reasons (email, social media, Office), accept the size increase — the compatibility benefit outweighs the size cost.