Convert WebP to PNG
Converts WebP files to PNG while keeping the transparency intact, which is the reason to choose PNG over JPG as the destination. Useful for logos, icons, stickers and product cutouts saved from the web that need to sit on a colored background rather than a white rectangle.
Use this without the search next time. Prathom Workbench puts Prathom's tools in your toolbar.
Add to Chrome — freeDrop your WEBP file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Transparency preserved pixel for pixel
- Lossless PNG output
- Batch conversion with ZIP download
- Optional resize during conversion
- Nothing uploaded to any server
How to use WebP to PNG
- 1
Drop in your WebP files
Add one or many. Each is decoded with its alpha channel intact and re-encoded as PNG.
- 2
Optionally cap the width
Set a maximum width to shrink oversized images during conversion, or leave it at zero to keep the original dimensions.
- 3
Convert and check
Results show the new dimensions and file size. Expect PNG to be larger than the WebP it came from.
- 4
Download
Save individual files, or take the batch as a single ZIP archive.
How it works
The browser's built-in WebP decoder produces a bitmap with four channels: red, green, blue, and alpha. That bitmap is drawn onto a canvas which is itself transparent by default, and the canvas is encoded as PNG.
The critical detail is what is deliberately not done. When converting to a format without transparency, a background color has to be painted first or transparent pixels come out black. Here there is no such step, because PNG can represent exactly what WebP held. Adding a background fill would be a bug.
PNG encoding then applies per-scanline filtering followed by DEFLATE compression. For the flat colors and hard edges typical of logos and icons this works very well, which is why a logo grows by a factor of three rather than thirty. For photographic content it works poorly, because there are almost no repeating patterns to compress.
If a maximum width is set, scaling happens before encoding, with progressive halving so edges stay clean. Note that scaling a transparent image resamples the alpha channel too, so partially transparent edges stay smooth.
When PNG is the right destination
Choose PNG when the image has transparency you need to keep. That is the whole decision, and it covers logos, app icons, stickers, emoji, product photographs that have been cut out from their background, and any graphic intended to sit on top of something else.
Choose PNG also for flat-color graphics without transparency — diagrams, charts, line art, screenshots of interfaces — because PNG will usually be both smaller and visibly sharper than JPG for that kind of content.
Choose JPG instead for photographs with no transparency. The file will be a small fraction of the size with no meaningful difference in appearance.
Why this matters more than it used to
Saving images from the web now routinely produces WebP files, and a large share of them are exactly the kind of asset where transparency matters: brand marks, icons, illustrations, and cutout product shots. Converting those to JPG destroys the transparency permanently, and the damage is not obvious until the image is placed on a colored background much later, in a document you have already sent.
That is the failure this page exists to prevent. If the image has a transparent background and you are unsure, convert it here rather than to JPG. A larger file is recoverable; a flattened one is not.
Examples
A brand logo with a transparent background
The alpha channel survives exactly, so this logo can now go on any background color without a visible box. The size increase is the cost of PNG storing every pixel precisely rather than approximating, and for a logo that will be reused everywhere it is a cost worth paying once.
A photograph with no transparency
Nearly a fortyfold increase, and the picture looks identical. There is no transparency here to justify PNG, so this conversion buys nothing but compatibility. For a photograph with no alpha channel, WebP to JPG is almost always the better choice.
Frequently asked questions
Is the transparency really preserved exactly?
Yes. Both formats store a full 8-bit alpha channel, so every level of partial transparency — the soft antialiased edge around a logo, a drop shadow fading to nothing — is carried across unchanged. This is the main practical difference from converting to JPG, which has no alpha channel at all and must fill transparent areas with a solid color.
Why is the PNG so much larger than the WebP?
WebP compresses lossily by default, discarding detail to save space, while PNG must reproduce every pixel exactly. The gap is smallest for flat graphics, where PNG's compression works well, and largest for photographs, where it has very little repetition to exploit. Increases of three to forty times are all normal depending on the content.
Does PNG improve on the WebP's quality?
No. Whatever the WebP encoder discarded is already gone, and PNG simply preserves the result faithfully from here on. The benefit of PNG is that no further loss occurs through subsequent edits and saves, not that it recovers anything. A PNG made from a heavily compressed WebP will show the same artifacts, just in a bigger file.
What happens to an animated WebP?
Only the first frame is converted. Standard PNG holds a single image, and while the APNG extension exists for animation, browsers do not expose a way to write it from a canvas. If you need to keep an animation, converting to GIF or a video format is the operation you want.
Can I convert several files at once?
Yes. Drop in as many as you like; each is converted independently and appears with its own result line, and the whole set can be downloaded as one ZIP. If a single file fails — because it is corrupt, or is not actually an image — the rest of the batch continues and the failure is reported separately.
Further reading
- A Lossless Conversion Changed Every Pixel in the ImageConvert a 16-bit PNG to lossless WebP, convert it back, and compare the two files pixel by pixel. Every single pixel is different. Nothing malfunctioned and the encoder did exactly what it advertises — because the word lossless makes a narrower promise than almost everybody assumes it does.
- Lossless WebP Was Smaller Than PNG on Every Image We TriedWebP has a reputation as the lossy format that replaces JPEG. It also has a lossless mode, and that mode is the more interesting one, because it competes with PNG rather than with JPEG — and in four separate tests it won every time, while producing files that were identical to the original pixel for pixel.
- Base64 Adds Exactly a Third, Whatever You Put Into ItBase64 has a reputation for making files bigger, and people are vague about by how much. It is exactly a third, every time, for every kind of data — and the reason it is exact is more useful to know than the number.