I don’t really get it. Suddenly some of the images I drag onto the Mac desktop from my Web browser are in WEBP format. What a pain! How can I just save these images in JPEG format instead?
Turns out that Google introduced the WebP image format quite a while ago: 2010 to be exact. It’s a pretty interesting format with some reasons to prefer it in terms of size, efficiency and flexibility. Unfortunately, ten years later it still isn’t widely used within Web apps and is mostly something you find on Google sites, particularly when you’re using Google Chrome as your Web browser. Of course, since the latest version of Microsoft Edge is also built atop Chromium it also has strong support for WebP, but MacOS X overall? Not so much.
Mostly this isn’t a big deal but you can definitely hit situations where having an image in .webp is less convenient than having that same image in .jpg format or similar. Tools can help convert it, but why be stuck having to take those extra steps? Instead let’s look at some ways to sidestep and change the format and a plug-in that automatically converts all WebP images into JPEG within Google Chrome too.
To start out, I most often encounter WebP as the result of a Google Image Search. Like this search for photos of the fun board game Shadows Over Camelot:
There’s nothing to indicate that the larger image on the right, from the Elusive Meeple Web site, is in WebP format, but if I drag and drop that image straight out of Chrome onto my Mac desktop, here’s what results:
Notice that the Mac can’t even show a preview of the image, and this is ten years after the image format was introduced. The preview feature unsurprisingly can’t show a preview either:
Well ugh. Not so good. But here’s a surprise: The image on the original Web page is actually a JPEG so a right-click in Chrome to “Save Image As…”, as shown:
And the default image format that appears is not WebP as you might expect, but rather JPEG!
Other images are in WebP source format, like this one on Wikipedia:
Again, perhaps unsurprisingly, in this instance that Save Image As… trick won’t work:
So what to do? There are two solutions: First off, open the image in its own tab (to get it as large as possible) then just take a screen capture. Odds are, that’ll then save it in PNG format, which is much easier to work with.
The other possibility is a very neat little Google Chrome extension called Save Image As PNG:
Add that to your Chrome browser (including Microsoft Edge or any other Chromium-based browser) and you’ll have a new menu item in addition to “Save Image As…” that simply specifies “Save Image As PNG…” Pretty darn easy, really.
And that’s the solution. Me? I use screen capture when it’s a significant issue, and I grumble every single time. 🙂
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Open the page on your phone or ipad then screenshot it and save to photos
A workaround, yes, but it changes the resolution and size of the image, which is worse the larger the image is on the page…
There is such an easy way to fix this go to Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\image/webp change webp to jpeg , save & it is fixed (until a Chrome update changes it back), then do it again
Going into your registry to change anything is not what I would call “easy”, and I recommend that most people never touch their registry because the danger of messing things up is way too high. If you’re hardcore, though, give it a try!
Using Firefox, this was happening. So, I tried Edge Chromium and Brave – same issue. 🙁 No problem.
I simply use Snip & Sketch, copy the picture, and save it from right within the program as JPG. Takes me less than 15 seconds.
I shared my portfolios on my websites, and stolen dozens time, and the thief sold in on fiverr, or to their client, or claim it as their own artwork by put their own watermark on it.
To be honest I like webp, after I convert all of my images to webp, my stolen work decrease. Maybe because art thief are dumb, and confused when download a webp images. lol
I have the same problem now with the new edge version, but it is happening when i save gif format files, when i initiate save as it goes to WEBP, with no animation! and there is no way to change it, but i find the only thing that will play it is if i go to open with Edge
I use Mozilla Firefox on Windows 10. Lately, I have encountered a slightly different (but similar) issue. I right click on a web image and then from the resulting menu, I click on “Save image as” and then download it. The resulting downloaded image on my PC shows a JPG extension, but when I try to open it using IrfanView, I receive this message: “The file [file path and file name] is a WEBP file with an incorrect extension! Rename?” I then click “yes” and IrfanView changes the file extension from JPG to WEBP. In order to actually save the file in a true/correct JPG format, I have to use IrfanView to convert it. So I conclude that the original web image was really a WEBP image, mislabeled as a JPG image.