Here's how to convert WebP to PNG in under a minute: drop the file into our free browser tool with PNG set as the output, or export it directly with Mac Preview or Windows Paint, both already on your computer. Any transparency in the source file survives the trip untouched. The one thing that will not happen is the file getting smaller; PNG almost always comes back bigger than the WebP you started with.
Most people converting a WebP to PNG did not pick WebP in the first place. A site served it by default, or someone right-clicked and saved an image that turned out to carry the .webp extension, and now a print shop, an older editor, or a form that only takes PNG or JPG will not take it. For the full picture on why WebP shows up uninvited and how it compares to the formats around it, see the guide to WebP and AVIF.
How to Convert WebP to PNG With Our Free Tool
The fastest way to convert WebP image to PNG is our WebP to PNG converter: drop the file in, the output format already set to PNG, and download the result. Batches run up to 30 images with no signup and files up to 25 MB each, and EXIF metadata, the hidden camera and location data most images carry, gets stripped automatically on every conversion, not a setting you have to find.
There is no quality slider to set for this particular trip. PNG compression is lossless, so the tool writes back every pixel the source WebP had; the control that matters for JPG or WebP output has nothing to adjust going the other way. If you only have one file to convert, the tool above is the whole job; the native-app and command-line routes below matter more once you are clearing out a folder of WebP images at once.
A free account raises the batch to 100 images a month with a usage dashboard, and Pro is $12 a month flat for 10,000 images, files up to 50 MB, and batches of 100. No per-image fee at any tier, and re-compressing a file already uploaded in a session, at any format, never costs another image.
Metadata handling is one real difference between the methods, not just a formality. If the source WebP carries EXIF data, the hidden information a camera or phone writes into a file including GPS coordinates, camera model, and a timestamp, our tool strips it automatically on every conversion, no setting to find. Preview and Paint generally carry whatever metadata is already sitting in the file straight through to the PNG, since stripping it is not part of a plain Export or Save as, so check the file's properties afterward if that matters to you.
Free WebP to PNG converter sites that aren't ours
If you would rather not use our tool, a few other free WebP to PNG converter sites work about the same way: CloudConvert, Ezgif, and iLoveIMG all accept a WebP upload and hand back a PNG with no install. They do the single-file job about as well as we do; what they do not match is our no-signup batch limit, automatic EXIF stripping, or a single pipeline that treats a batch of 30 files the same way it treats one.
Convert WebP to PNG on a Mac With Preview or Photos
On a Mac, open the WebP in Preview and export it directly to PNG, or use the Photos app to convert a whole batch in one pass.
Preview, one file at a time
Double-click the WebP to open it in Preview, or right-click and choose Open With, then Preview. Go to File, then Export, set the Format menu to PNG, and save. There is no quality slider to set here either, since PNG has none to offer; what the preview shows is the file you get (iDownloadBlog).
Photos, for a whole folder at once
Select every WebP you want converted, then File, Export, Export n Photos, set Photo Kind to PNG, and export. Photos skips the quality-tier menu it shows for JPEG exports, since a PNG batch has nothing to tune, and hands back every file with transparency intact in one pass.
Convert WebP to PNG on Windows With Paint
On Windows, right-click the WebP file, choose Open with, then Paint, since Paint has read and written WebP natively since 2023. Once the file is open, go to File, then Save as, pick PNG under the file type list, choose a location, and save; transparency in the source file survives the trip, since PNG carries an alpha channel the same way WebP's own transparency mode does (PCWorld).
If Paint does not list WebP as an option to open at all, Windows itself is out of date, not the file. Running Windows Update resolves the large majority of those cases, since native WebP support only landed in 2023 and not every installation has picked it up yet.
Can You Convert WebP to PNG From the Command Line?
Yes, and PNG is the format dwebp handles best. Download the libwebp package from Google's WebP project page, open a terminal or command prompt in its bin folder, and run dwebp image.webp -o image.png; the tool decodes straight to PNG with no intermediate step, since PNG is what the reference decoder was built to output in the first place.
Unlike a JPG target, which dwebp cannot write directly, PNG needs no workaround, and the same binary runs identically on Windows, Mac, and Linux, since libwebp is the same code on every platform. A short batch loop, running the command in sequence against every file in a folder, converts dozens of WebP files to PNG in one pass, the fastest route if you are clearing out a whole directory rather than one image.
How Do You Batch Convert a Folder of WebP Files to PNG?
For a whole folder without touching the command line, IrfanView, a free Windows image viewer, has a dedicated batch mode built for exactly this: File, then Batch Conversion, Rename, add every WebP in the folder, set Output format to PNG, and click Start; hundreds of files convert in one run instead of one at a time (IrfanView).
This is the route people actually ask for. A recurring Reddit thread on r/software, from someone with a large folder of WebP images needing PNG, settles on batch mode in a free viewer as the fix, rather than converting one file at a time through a browser tab. The dwebp loop above does the identical job for anyone who would rather stay in a terminal; either one clears a folder in one pass. Linux users who would rather skip IrfanView, a Windows-only tool, get the same batch result through GIMP's Script-Fu console or its batch export options, free on every platform, both able to point at a folder of WebP files and export the lot as PNG in one pass.
Does Renaming a .webp File to .png Actually Work?
No. Renaming a .webp file to .png changes only the file name, not the pixel data stored inside it, and the file will not open correctly as a PNG anywhere that actually checks what it is looking at.
Every WebP file opens with the same four bytes: RIFF, followed by a file size, then the letters WEBP naming the container format inside (Google Developers, WebP). A real PNG opens with its own fixed signature instead, an eight-byte header starting \x89PNG. Software that reads an image correctly checks that header, not the file name, so a renamed file still announces itself as WebP no matter what the extension claims, and most programs either refuse to open it or read it wrong. A handful of very permissive apps ignore the header and open the renamed file anyway, but that is the app being forgiving, not a real conversion, and the file will fail the moment it hits software that checks properly, including most print vendors and upload forms.
Does Converting WebP to PNG Lose Quality or Transparency?
Transparency survives every real conversion route. If you convert transparent WebP to PNG using our tool, Preview, Paint, or dwebp, the alpha channel carries over exactly, because PNG stores a full alpha channel the same way WebP's own transparency mode does (W3C, PNG specification).
Quality is a slightly different question, and the honest answer depends on how the WebP was made in the first place. A lossless WebP has thrown nothing away, so converting it to PNG loses nothing either; you get back the exact pixels you started with, just in a bigger file. A lossy WebP already discarded detail the moment it was encoded, and converting that file to PNG afterward does not lose anything further. PNG just stores whatever pixels are left with perfect fidelity from that point on, but it cannot bring back detail the WebP encoder already threw away. Where the file loses ground is size, not quality.
Why Does the PNG Come Back Bigger Than the WebP?
Because lossless WebP is already smaller than PNG for the exact same pixels, converting back to PNG usually adds size instead of saving it.
Google's own measurements put lossless WebP at about 26 percent smaller than the equivalent PNG for the same image (Google Developers, WebP). Reverse that relationship and the math is straightforward: divide the WebP's size by 0.74 to estimate the PNG you will get back. A 2 MB lossless WebP converts to a PNG of roughly 2.7 MB, not because anything went wrong, but because PNG's compression has no lossy mode to lean on and has to spend real bytes storing exactly what WebP already stored more efficiently.
| File | Size |
|---|---|
| Original WebP (lossless) | 2.0 MB |
| Converted PNG | 2.7 MB |
A lossy WebP, the kind an ordinary photo usually is, grows even further when it becomes a PNG, since PNG then has to spend bytes storing detail at full fidelity that the lossy encoder never had to store precisely in the first place. A jump of several times the original size is normal for a photographic WebP converted to PNG, not a sign the conversion failed. Part of the gap is mechanism, not just math: lossless WebP predicts large blocks from neighboring pixels before storing what is left over, a more capable version of the filtering PNG's own DEFLATE-based compression uses, so WebP starts from a smaller number before either format even gets to general-purpose compression.
Should You Convert to PNG, Keep WebP, or Use JPG Instead?
Convert to PNG when the file needs to keep transparency and the destination will not take WebP; reach for JPG instead only when the image is an ordinary photo with no transparent pixels to protect.
| Your WebP file | Convert to PNG? |
|---|---|
| Logo or icon with a transparent background | Yes |
| Screenshot or flat color graphic | Yes, keeps every pixel exact |
| Ordinary photo, no transparency | No, PNG just makes it bigger for no benefit |
| Animated WebP | No, standard PNG has no animation either |
An ordinary photo rarely has a good reason to become a PNG. Nothing about a photograph needs a lossless file or an alpha channel, and PNG cannot compress that kind of detail anywhere near as efficiently as WebP already did, so the only real effect of converting is a much larger file for the same look.
A logo or icon sits at the other end of the decision. The file is small in either format, so PNG buys guaranteed compatibility everywhere WebP still gets rejected, for a cost measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes, which is a trade worth making.
Animation does not survive the move regardless of which way you convert. WebP can hold a short animation the way a GIF does, and a standard PNG holds exactly one frame, so converting an animated WebP to PNG keeps whichever frame the format reads as primary and drops the rest. That is a limit of the PNG format itself, not a gap in any particular converter.
Can You Convert WebP to PNG on iPhone or Android?
Neither iOS nor Android ships a built-in WebP-to-PNG export the way Preview and Paint do on desktop, so the fastest fix on a phone is the same free browser tool: it is a page, not an app, and runs the same in Safari or Chrome on a phone as it does on a laptop. Tap to upload the WebP from your camera roll, Files, or Downloads, confirm PNG as the output, and download the result back to your device.
A screenshot is worth knowing about as a last resort, not a real converter. It works because a screenshot always saves in the phone's native format, but it also crops to the screen, discards any transparency the original had, and throws away the source resolution, so save it for when nothing else is available. Android's Files by Google app opens a WebP without trouble, but its share menu has no Save as PNG option either, the same gap desktop file managers had before Paint added native WebP support. Chrome for Android will display a WebP full screen from a download, but the browser's own Save image option saves it back out as WebP again, not PNG, so a round trip through a browser tab does not solve anything a proper converter does.
If the WebP in front of you needs to become a PNG right now, convert it here and keep the transparency that made you pick PNG in the first place.