webp → png
WebP to PNG, and transparency survives
Almost every image you save from a website these days arrives as WebP, and a surprising amount of software still declines to open one. This produces a PNG instead.
Processed on your own hardware · never transmitted, never stored
What happens when you drop a file in
The file stays put. Your browser opens it the same way an image viewer would. There is no transfer, which is why there is no upload bar to watch.
An encoder arrives once. The first job on this site pulls down a compiled build of FFmpeg, roughly 30 MB. It is kept afterwards, so every job after the first starts immediately.
Your own hardware does the job. The work happens in this tab, on your processor. A laptop from the last few years handles short clips in well under real time.
The result lands in Downloads. Assembled in memory and handed straight to your browser. Close the tab and every trace of it is gone.
A format built for pages, not for people
WebP exists to make websites lighter, and at that job it succeeds — noticeably better compression than PNG or JPEG at quality nobody can distinguish. Which is why so much of the web now serves it by default.
The trouble starts the moment the file leaves the browser. Desktop applications, print workflows, older editing software and a fair number of upload forms will look at a WebP and decline. It was never designed to travel.
PNG is the obvious landing place when transparency is part of the picture: lossless, understood by everything, and unchanged in that respect since the nineties. What it costs is bulk — the same image typically occupies several times the space.
This direction adds nothing and removes nothing
PNG stores an image exactly, so the conversion is faithful to whatever the WebP held. If that WebP was lossy — and most on the web are — the PNG preserves the already-compressed result precisely. Detail discarded when the WebP was made stays gone, and that is true of any tool you could use.
Common questions
Does transparency survive?
Yes. PNG carries an alpha channel and it comes across untouched.
Why did the file grow?
PNG discards nothing. WebP earns its small size by throwing detail away selectively. Keeping the same picture without that trick costs space.
What about animated WebP?
Only the first frame converts, since a PNG holds one image. Animation needs GIF or MP4 instead.
Is it uploaded anywhere?
No, your browser opens it locally and converts it on your machine.