How to View WebP Files on Windows 10 and 11

If a WebP image will not open on your PC, the fix is almost never a download - it is usually one setting or one free Microsoft extension.

WebP is Google's image format, and the web is full of it because it makes small files that still look sharp.

The catch is that it arrives on your PC with an extension Windows did not always recognise.

That has changed, and most of the advice still floating around online is a few years out of date.

Windows Probably Opens WebP Already

Current Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines ship with Microsoft's WebP decoder in place, so Microsoft Photos, Paint and File Explorer thumbnails all handle .webp without you doing anything.

This is the part most guides get wrong. They were written when WebP really was a stranger to Windows, and they still tell readers to install a codec that is already sitting on the machine.

So the ten-second test above matters more than any instruction on this page. Run it before you install anything.

If Windows Refuses to Open It

Older Windows 10 builds, freshly imaged work laptops and machines where the Store apps have been stripped out are the ones that still choke on WebP.

The fix is Microsoft's own free add-on, WebP Image Extensions. It is a small decoder that teaches File Explorer, Photos and other Windows apps to read the format, and it costs nothing.

• Install WebP Image Extensions and let it finish - there is no window to click through.
• Right-click a .webp file, choose Open with, and pick Photos.
• Tick Always use this app so the next one opens on a double-click.

If thumbnails still show a blank page icon afterwards, the thumbnail cache is stale rather than broken. Open Disk Cleanup, tick Thumbnails, and let Windows rebuild it.

Why Your WebP Images Look Too Dark

There is one genuine bug worth knowing about, and it only bites people who brought back the old Windows Photo Viewer.

Microsoft's extension renders WebP images noticeably dark in that legacy viewer, with washed-out contrast. Photos and Paint are unaffected, so most readers will never see it.

The workaround is to swap Microsoft's decoder for Google's older WebP Codec for Windows, which plugs into the same Windows Imaging Component and renders correctly in Photo Viewer.

Viewers That Never Needed an Extension

A standalone image viewer carries its own decoders, which means WebP opens whether or not Windows understands it.

This is the route to take on a locked-down machine, and it is the faster route generally, because these open in a fraction of the time Photos takes.

Any of these makes the codec question go away for good, since none of them asks Windows for help decoding a picture.

When You Actually Need a Different Format

Sometimes the problem is not your PC at all - it is the thing you need to hand the file to.

Older Office builds, some printers, a few web forms and plenty of older phones still reject .webp outright, and no extension on your machine changes that.

Converting takes seconds in a browser tab, with nothing to install:

• WebP to JPG for anything that has to be universally accepted.
• WebP to PNG when the image has a transparent background to preserve.
• PNG to WebP going the other way, to shrink images for your own website.
• WebP to ICO if you are building a favicon.

Worth knowing before you convert: WebP is usually the smaller file by a wide margin, so a JPG copy of the same picture will take up more space. If you are curious how it stacks up against the newer options, we compared AVIF against JPEG and WebP separately.

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