Why Every Image You Save From the Web Is Suddenly a .webp
At some point in the last few years, right-clicking an image on a web page and choosing "Save image as" stopped producing a JPG and started producing something called a .webp. Nothing on your computer changed. The web did.
What actually happened
Browsers send an Accept header with every image request, listing the formats they can display. Since Safari 14 shipped in September 2020, every mainstream browser has advertised WebP support. Servers and CDNs read that header and send the smallest format the browser can handle.
So the image on the page was probably uploaded as a JPG. What was delivered to your browser — and therefore what "Save image as" writes to disk — is a WebP the CDN generated on the fly. You are saving the delivery copy, not the original.
Who is doing this
Essentially everyone. WordPress converts uploads to WebP by default in recent versions. Shopify serves WebP from its CDN. Next.js generates it through the built-in Image component. Cloudflare Polish, Cloudinary, imgix, Fastly Image Optimizer and every other image CDN do automatic format negotiation. None of this required the site owner to make a decision — it is on by default.
From a performance standpoint this is unambiguously good. WebP is 25-35% smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality, and images are the largest component of page weight on most sites. Billions of image requests a day got meaningfully faster.
Why it is annoying anyway
Because the software on your computer did not keep pace with the software on the web. Photoshop only added WebP support in version 23.2, released in 2022. Microsoft Office added it in the 2021 release. Outlook still will not render one inline in an email body. Plenty of upload forms, print shops, photo kiosks and internal business systems validate against a hard-coded format list written years before WebP existed.
So you have a file that displays perfectly in the browser you saved it from, and is useless in the application you saved it for. That gap is the entire reason this site exists.
Renaming it to .jpg does not work
This suggestion circulates widely and it does not help. The file extension is a label; the bytes inside are still VP8-encoded. Software that checks the file header will reject it as corrupt, and software that trusts the extension will produce garbage or crash. The file has to be genuinely decoded and re-encoded.
How to get a usable file
Convert it. WebP to JPG is the universal answer — nothing rejects a JPG. WebP to PNG is the one to choose if the image has a transparent background you need to keep, since JPG has no alpha channel and will flatten it onto white.
Or avoid getting a WebP in the first place. Some sites still link the original file rather than the delivery copy — opening the image in a new tab and checking the URL sometimes reveals a .jpg you can save directly. This works less often than it used to.
Is this going to keep happening?
Yes, and it will spread. AVIF is following the same adoption curve WebP did, and CDNs are already negotiating it where supported. The long-term fix is desktop software catching up — which is slowly happening — but in the meantime, converting is a five-second job.