JPEG to WebP

Why convert JPEG to WebP?

JPEG is the universal photographic format — every device, every browser, every form accepts it. It is lossy and has no transparency, which makes it the wrong choice for logos and screenshots and the right one for photographs.

WebP is Google's web image format, and it is now what a great many sites serve. Save a picture from the web and you often get a .webp file that Photoshop, older Office versions and plenty of upload forms will refuse.

What changes, and what does not

Converting to JPEG discards some data permanently. Keep your original if you may need to edit it again later, because repeatedly re-saving a JPEG degrades it a little each time.

Converting to a classic format fixes that immediately. WebP supports transparency, so if the image has a transparent background and you convert it to JPEG, those areas are filled with your chosen background colour — pick PNG instead if you need the transparency kept.

It happens on your device

This conversion runs in your browser. The image is decoded, drawn to a canvas and re-encoded as WebP locally, so it is instant and the file is never uploaded. There is no queue, no daily limit and no watermark, because there is no server doing the work and therefore no cost to ration.

Converting a batch

Drop in up to thirty images at once and you get a zip back with every one converted. This is the usual case for a folder of JPEG files off a phone or camera, where converting them one at a time is the actual chore.

Quality

The quality setting controls how hard the encoder compresses. At 88 the difference is invisible on a photograph. Below about 60 you will start to see softening around edges and detail in flat areas such as skies.