**WebP to PNG converter — free, online, keeps transparency** > Convert WebP to PNG online, free, with the alpha channel intact — for software that will not read WebP. Lossless from the decoded pixels, nothing uploaded. Source: https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-png/ · updated: 2026-09-11 # Convert a WebP to PNG and keep the transparency The safe direction. PNG is lossless, carries a full alpha channel, and is read by everything ever written — so a WebP that some piece of software refuses becomes a file that nothing refuses. It will be bigger, and the receipt says by how much. DROP · PASTE · CHOOSE Drop a WebP 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 a WebP file is WebP is an image format Google published in 2010. It is a RIFF container — the same chunk-based structure as a WAV file — holding either a lossy image coded with VP8's intra-frame tools, or a lossless one coded with VP8L, or an animation made of either. All three variants can carry an alpha channel, and the container has slots for EXIF, XMP and an ICC profile alongside the picture. The reason so much of the web serves it is straightforward arithmetic: at a matched visual quality a lossy WebP is typically 25 to 35 per cent smaller than the equivalent JPEG, and a lossless WebP is 20 to 30 per cent smaller than the equivalent PNG. On a page with a dozen images that is a measurable difference in how quickly the page becomes usable, which is why content management systems started converting on upload and why files with a .webp extension started arriving in people's downloads folders. Support in browsers has been universal since Safari 14 in 2020. Support outside browsers is where it still bites, and that is what this page is for. ## Lossless does not mean unchanged PNG stores exactly what it is given, so the conversion adds no loss of its own. What it cannot do is undo loss that already happened. If the source was a lossy WebP, the decoder produces the image with its compression artefacts in place, and the PNG then records those artefacts faithfully and forever. This is worth being precise about, because "convert to PNG for better quality" is common advice and it is half right. The PNG is not better than the WebP — it is a lossless copy of it. What the PNG does give you is a file that will not degrade further: you can crop it, annotate it, re-save it and pass it through another tool without each step adding another generation of lossy compression. For a file that is going to be worked on, that is a real advantage. If the source was a lossless WebP, the conversion is genuinely round-trip exact: the same pixels in, the same pixels out, in a different container. ## Expect the file to grow PNG never discards anything, and a photograph contains an enormous amount of detail that a person cannot see and a lossy codec therefore throws away. Converting a photographic WebP to PNG routinely multiplies the file size by ten or more: a 200-kilobyte lossy WebP becomes a two-to-three-megabyte PNG holding the same picture. For a screenshot, a diagram or a flat graphic the difference is far smaller, because there was less detail to discard in the first place and PNG's filters handle flat colour well. A lossless WebP converted to PNG typically grows by twenty to forty per cent, which is the same gap measured from the other side. The receipt reports the exact change, so there is never a need to guess. If the result is too large for where it is going, [the compressor](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-compressor/) can bring it under a ceiling, and [the resizer](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-resizer/) is the larger lever when the dimensions are more than the destination needs. ## Transparency, and why it survives here Both formats have a full eight-bit alpha channel, so every partially-transparent pixel — the soft edge of an illustration, an anti-aliased letterform, a drop shadow — comes across exactly. Nothing is flattened and nothing is matted onto a background colour. That is the difference between this page and [the JPEG converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-jpg/), where transparency has to be destroyed because JPEG has nowhere to put it. If a graphic has to sit on an unknown background — a logo, a cut-out, an icon — PNG is the conversion that keeps it usable. The one thing that does not survive is animation. An animated WebP is decoded as its first frame, which is a property of every canvas-based tool; there is no way to write an animated PNG from a browser canvas either. ## When to convert, and when not to Convert when something downstream needs PNG specifically: a design tool that will not import WebP, a print supplier's asset specification, an application with a fixed list of extensions, a piece of embedded software, a library in another language whose image support stops at PNG and JPEG. Convert also when the file is about to be edited repeatedly and you want to stop the generational loss there. Do not convert for the web. Serving a PNG where a WebP would do makes the page slower for every visitor, and the browsers that cannot read WebP no longer meaningfully exist. Do not convert to "improve" a photograph either: the loss already happened, and the PNG is a large, faithful copy of a lossy image. And if the only problem is that you cannot open the file, you do not need this page: dragging a WebP into any browser window displays it, and both Windows Photos and macOS Preview have read the format for years. ## Which of the three conversions you actually want There are three directions out of a WebP and they answer different questions, so it is worth being explicit about which one is in front of you. This page, WebP to PNG, is the one to choose when the file will be worked on again — cropped, annotated, composited, re-saved — or when transparency has to survive. PNG is lossless, so nothing degrades further no matter how many times it passes through an editor, and its alpha channel is identical to WebP's. [WebP to JPG](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-jpg/) is the one to choose when something downstream simply will not open anything modern: an older desktop application, a print supplier's preflight, a portal with a fixed list of extensions. It costs transparency — JPEG has no alpha channel and every transparent pixel becomes a colour you pick — and it adds a second lossy pass, which is why that page defaults to a higher quality than you would normally set. [Compressing in place](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-compressor/) is the one people reach for last and should often reach for first. If the problem is that the file is too big rather than that the format is wrong, converting it is the expensive way round: staying in WebP and lowering the quality, or capping the dimensions, gets a smaller file that everything on the web already reads. ## What happens to the metadata Nothing comes across. The conversion runs from decoded pixels, so any EXIF, XMP, ICC profile or C2PA manifest in the source is not written into the output; the PNG that comes out has an image header, the image data and nothing else. That is usually the desired outcome and occasionally not — a photographer's copyright line and a file's provenance record both go with it. If you want to know what was in there, [the metadata tool](https://appvau.lt/tools/photo-metadata/) reads all of it and explains each field before anything is removed. If a WebP is carrying a location you want gone but you want to keep the WebP, that tool removes it without re-encoding the picture at all — which is strictly better than converting for the purpose. Everything on this page runs in the browser tab: the decode, the encode and the size measurement. No request carries the file anywhere, and there is no endpoint on this domain that would accept one. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO ## The limits, stated here rather than discovered later - The PNG is lossless from the decoded pixels, not from the original camera data. If the WebP was lossy, its compression artefacts are now stored losslessly. - Expect the file to grow, often several times over, because PNG does not discard anything. - An animated WebP is converted as its first frame. ## Questions people ask about this 1. 01 Does converting WebP to PNG lose quality? No pixels are lost in the conversion: PNG is lossless, so it stores exactly what the WebP decoder produced. What it cannot do is undo the compression that already happened — a lossy WebP has artefacts, and the PNG preserves them faithfully. 2. 02 Why is the PNG so much larger? Because PNG never discards information and WebP was designed to. A photograph that is 200 kB as a lossy WebP is routinely 2-3 MB as a PNG. For a screenshot or a flat graphic the difference is much smaller. 3. 03 Is transparency kept? Yes. Both formats have a full alpha channel and it is carried across unchanged. 4. 04 What is a WebP file? An image format Google published in 2010, built on the VP8 video codec and later VP8L for its lossless mode. It stores lossy or lossless images, both with transparency and both usually smaller than the equivalent JPEG or PNG, which is why so much of the web now serves it. 5. 05 Is the file uploaded? No. The conversion runs in this browser tab. ## Other tools on this site [All 10 tools](https://appvau.lt/tools/) - [Image files PNG to WebP converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/png-to-webp/) - [Image files WebP to JPG converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-jpg/) - [Image files Image resizer](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-resizer/) 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/) WebP to PNG 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/webp-to-png/ 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).