Convert WebP to PNG

How to convert WebP to PNG

1. Choose one or more WebP images — drag them in or use the file picker.
2. Download the PNG — a single file, or a zip if you converted several at once.

Photoshop needed a plug-in for WebP until 2022, and Office 2016 still refuses it

WebP came out of Google in 2010, but for most of the decade that followed it stayed a Chrome and Android format: Firefox only added it in January 2019, and Safari not until September 2020. Any desktop application written, or last given a new import filter, before that window had no reason to learn the format — and file-type filters, once written, tend to outlive the argument that produced them, which is why a handful still demand a converted PNG today.

Photoshop opened WebP only through Google’s separate WebPShop plug-in until version 23.2 arrived in February 2022. Word and PowerPoint in the perpetual-licence Office 2016 and 2019 will not insert a .webp at all; the subscription Microsoft 365 desktop apps gained it in Version 2109, released to most users in late 2021. On Windows 10 even the File Explorer thumbnail stays blank until the Store’s WebP Image Extension is installed, so the file looks empty before anything opens it.

The same wall appears at upload, and Chrome builds the trap itself: because so many sites now serve WebP, its right-click Save image as writes a .webp to disk, which an order form or job portal that lists only JPEG and PNG then refuses on the extension alone. Phones add their own twist — WebP is WhatsApp’s sticker format, so a .webp dropped into a chat can arrive as a sticker rather than a photograph. Re-saving as PNG clears both.

An animated WebP converts to its opening frame, and nothing warns that the rest existed

WebP is a RIFF container. A still one holds a single coded image; an animated one opens with a VP8X chunk, then an ANIM chunk carrying the loop count, then a run of ANMF chunks, one per frame, each with its own duration. Google’s own figure for re-encoding an animated GIF as lossy WebP is 64 per cent smaller, which is why so many sites now serve motion this way — and why a .webp saved from one of them may well be moving.

A canvas holds one frame’s worth of pixels and nothing else. Unlike some formats, WebP defines no separate poster or default image, so the decoder falls back to the first ANMF frame — the opening still — and the PNG written here is exactly that, with nothing to announce what was dropped. A mid-sequence frame would not be a standalone picture on this path anyway: each ANMF rectangle is composited onto the canvas under its own blend and disposal method, so a later frame only exists once its predecessors have been drawn.

Keeping the motion means a format that holds frames. A plain PNG cannot hold a second one; APNG can, and the W3C only folded it into the official PNG specification with the Third Edition on 24 June 2025. A WebP-aware tool such as ImageMagick can instead write every frame out to a GIF or a numbered PNG sequence. Telling an animated file apart beforehand is easy: its header carries a VP8X chunk with the animation bit set, which a hex viewer shows in the first 32 bytes.

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