**PNG to WebP converter — free, online, lossless or lossy** > Convert a PNG to WebP online, free: lossless for exact pixels or lossy for a much smaller file. Transparency survives both and the saving is measured. Source: https://appvau.lt/tools/png-to-webp/ · updated: 2026-09-11 # Convert a PNG to WebP, lossless or lossy, keeping transparency Lossless WebP stores the same pixels as a PNG in about a quarter less space, and lossy WebP keeps the transparency that JPEG cannot. The conversion happens in this tab, and the tool checks that your browser really has a WebP encoder before it starts. DROP · PASTE · CHOOSE Drop a PNG here or choose a file. It is opened in this browser tab and never uploaded — this page has no endpoint to upload it to. ## What changes, and what does not PNG and WebP are solving the same problem fourteen years apart. PNG, finished in 1996, stores an image losslessly using a general-purpose compressor with a set of per-row prediction filters in front of it. WebP, published by Google in 2010, has two modes: a lossy one built on the VP8 video codec's intra-frame coding, and a lossless one with a considerably richer set of transforms — colour decorrelation, a palette, backward references, and a per-region entropy model. The practical consequence is that lossless WebP produces the same pixels as PNG in roughly 20 to 30 per cent less space on most real images. Not all: a small image with very few colours occasionally comes out larger, because PNG's palette mode is already close to optimal and WebP's header is bigger. The tool measures and reports the change either way rather than assuming the direction. *The two formats, side by side* | Property | PNG | WebP | | --- | --- | --- | | Lossless | Always | Optional | | Lossy | No | Yes | | Transparency | Yes | Yes, in both modes | | Animation | APNG, patchily supported | Yes | | Colour depth | Up to 16 bits per channel | 8 bits per channel | | Metadata it can carry | tEXt, iTXt, zTXt, eXIf, iCCP, caBX (C2PA) | EXIF, XMP, ICCP | | Written by a browser canvas | Yes | Yes | The one row where PNG wins outright is colour depth. PNG stores up to 16 bits per channel; WebP stores 8. For a photograph that is irrelevant, and for a rendered gradient or a scientific image that has to survive further processing, it is the reason to stay on PNG. ## Lossless or lossy — the decision is about content, not size Choose lossless whenever the image contains text, a diagram, a user interface, line art or flat areas of colour. Lossy codecs work by discarding detail the eye is bad at noticing in photographs, and every one of those assumptions fails on a hard black edge: you get ringing around letterforms and a faint halo along every boundary. On a screenshot, lossless WebP is both smaller than PNG and correct. Choose lossy when the content is photographic and the file size matters more than the last per cent of fidelity. A photograph exported as PNG is a common and expensive mistake — the format is doing its job faithfully and storing sensor noise pixel by pixel, which is why a twelve-megapixel photo lands at fifteen megabytes. Converting that to lossy WebP at quality 82 routinely produces a file one fiftieth the size that nobody can tell apart at viewing distance. Lossy WebP with transparency deserves its own sentence, because it is the capability that has no alternative. If you need a small file with a real alpha channel — a product cut-out, a logo over a photograph, an illustration with soft edges — the choice used to be a large PNG or a JPEG with the transparency baked onto a background you had to guess in advance. Lossy WebP removed that trade-off and it is still under-used. ## Support, in 2026 Every browser currently in use displays WebP. Chrome and Firefox have since 2018 and 2019, Safari since version 14 in 2020, and Edge since it moved to Chromium. On the desktop, Windows Photos has read WebP since 2019 and macOS Preview since Big Sur. Android has decoded it since 4.0. What is still patchy is everything else: older versions of desktop design software, some email clients rendering an attached image inline, a few print workflows, and the long tail of line-of-business applications that accept "an image" and mean JPEG. That is what [the other direction](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-jpg/) is for. One browser detail this tool handles that most do not. A canvas asked to write WebP in a browser that has no WebP encoder does not fail — it quietly returns a PNG, with the wrong bytes under the right file name. This page encodes a one-pixel test image first and checks the type that comes back, so a browser without the encoder gets a clear message instead of a mislabelled download. That failure is easy to ship and very hard to notice afterwards. ## What the conversion drops The output is encoded from pixels, so nothing from the source file's metadata comes across: no EXIF, no XMP, no PNG text chunks, no C2PA manifest. For a screenshot or an exported graphic that is generally welcome and occasionally not — PNG text chunks are where image generators write the prompt, and where some pipelines keep a document identifier. If you want to see what was in there before it goes, [the metadata tool](https://appvau.lt/tools/photo-metadata/) reads PNG text chunks, EXIF and C2PA in all three formats and explains each field. If you want to keep the picture and lose only the metadata, that tool does it without re-encoding at all. Transparency is preserved by the conversion itself, in both modes. Animation is not: an animated PNG is read as its first frame, which is a limitation of every canvas-based tool including this one. ## Where this sits among the other tools If the goal is a smaller file rather than a specific format, [the compressor](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-compressor/) is the better page: it can aim at a size ceiling and it will pick the format for you. If the goal is smaller dimensions, [the resizer](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-resizer/) is the bigger lever — halving the width quarters the pixel count, which beats any format change. This page is for when the format itself is the requirement: a static-site build that wants WebP, a CMS that will not accept PNG over a size, an image going into a page where the last thirty per cent matters. It does one conversion, reports what changed, and sends nothing anywhere. The format reference behind this page — which formats a browser can decode and which it can encode, what metadata each container can carry — is published as JSON at [the data API](https://appvau.lt/api/), so the same table can be checked against rather than retyped. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO ## The limits, stated here rather than discovered later - Lossless WebP is smaller than PNG on nearly everything, but not on everything: a small palette image occasionally goes the other way, and the tool reports the increase rather than hiding it. - An animated PNG is read as a single frame. - Safari gained canvas WebP export in version 14; an older browser is told rather than handed a mislabelled file. **What is checked:** The tool checks that this browser really has a WebP encoder before it starts. A browser without one silently returns a PNG under a .webp name, which is how the wrong bytes end up in a deploy. ## Questions people ask about this 1. 01 Is WebP better than PNG? For photographs and for anything with soft gradients, yes: lossless WebP is typically 25-30% smaller with identical pixels, and lossy WebP with transparency is a format PNG has no answer to. For a small flat graphic with few colours — an icon, a simple logo — PNG is sometimes still smaller, and the tool tells you which way it went. 2. 02 Does WebP support transparency? Yes, in both its lossless and its lossy mode. That is the main reason to convert a transparent PNG to WebP rather than to JPEG: JPEG has no alpha channel and flattens transparency onto a solid colour. 3. 03 What is the difference between lossless and lossy WebP? Lossless reproduces every pixel exactly and is the right choice for screenshots, diagrams and anything with text in it. Lossy discards detail the way JPEG does and is typically a fifth of the size on a photograph. Both keep transparency. 4. 04 Do all browsers support WebP? Every current browser displays WebP, including Safari since version 14 and Edge since it moved to Chromium. What is less universal is software outside the browser: some older desktop applications, some email clients and some print workflows still do not read it. 5. 05 Is the file uploaded to convert it? No. The conversion uses the encoder built into your browser and runs entirely in this tab. 6. 06 Will converting lose my metadata? Yes. The output is encoded from pixels, so EXIF, XMP and any C2PA record are dropped. For a screenshot or a graphic that is usually what you want; if it is not, keep the original. ## Other tools on this site [All 10 tools](https://appvau.lt/tools/) - [Image files WebP to PNG converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-png/) - [Image files Image compressor](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-compressor/) - [Image files WebP to JPG converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-jpg/) These tools exist because the same problem keeps turning up underneath the app: a photograph says more than the person sending it meant to. App-Vault is the iPhone side of that — an encrypted vault for the files that should not be in the camera roll at all. [What the vault does](https://appvau.lt/photo-vault/), [the cryptography behind it](https://appvau.lt/encryption/) are documented rather than asserted. [Home](https://appvau.lt/) [Browser tools](https://appvau.lt/tools/) PNG to WebP converter GET STARTED ## Seal the vault. Free to download. The free tier holds one file. Premium removes the limit — Weekly from $3.99 or Yearly from $29.99 with a 7-day free trial. [Open App-Vault on iPhone](https://appvau.lt/download/) --- HTML version: https://appvau.lt/tools/png-to-webp/ Structured data for this site: https://appvau.lt/api/v1/openapi.json · https://appvau.lt/llms.txt Free to quote and reuse with a link back to the source URL above (CC BY 4.0).