WebP Will Not Open in Windows Photos: What Windows Is Actually Missing

Photos is not the thing that is broken

You double-clicked a .webp, Windows Photos refused it, and the obvious conclusion is that Photos is behind. It is not, and chasing it is why this problem takes people an afternoon.

Photos, File Explorer’s thumbnails, Paint and the old Windows Photo Viewer are four front ends over one shared piece of Windows: the Windows Imaging Component. WIC is where a format is either understood or not, and every one of those apps inherits the answer. Fixing “Photos” is the wrong altitude. The codec underneath it is the right one.

Microsoft’s own list of the codecs WIC ships with is unusually blunt about where WebP sits. The page opens by saying these codecs are “either built into Windows, or they’re extension codecs downloadable from the Microsoft Store”.[1] Then it lists them. BMP, DDS, DNG, GIF, HD Photo, ICO, JPEG, JPEG XR, PNG and TIFF each get a row describing a native codec that is already on your machine.

WebP gets a row too. Its entire contents are a link to the Microsoft Store.

WebP is the only common image format Windows does not decode on its own. Every other format you meet arrived with the operating system. WebP arrives in a free package that somebody has to install, and on your machine nobody has.

Why the same file opens on your colleague’s laptop

Because they have the package and you do not. Nothing else differs.

This is also why the problem feels random. The extension installs quietly, ships with some machines and not others, and is the kind of thing a previous owner or an IT rollout may have done years ago. Two computers running the same build of Windows 11 can disagree completely about whether a .webp is an image, and neither will tell you why.

Which of the four symptoms do you have?

“WebP will not open” is at least four separate complaints, and they are worth separating because one of them is not fixed by the same thing as the others.

The codec extension has existed since 2018. The ability to set a .webp as your desktop background turned up in an Insider preview build in January 2026.[7] Eight years, same operating system, same format. Windows never adopted WebP in one go; each surface picked it up whenever it got round to it, which is why your experience of the format changes from one dialog to the next.

Fix 1: install the codec Windows left out

The package is called WebP Image Extension, the publisher is Microsoft, and it is free. Its Store listing states plainly that it “will enable you to view WebP images in the Windows File Explorer, Photos and other Windows apps”.[2]

Open the Microsoft Store, search WebP Image Extension, install it, and restart the app you were fighting with. There is no configuration and nothing to choose.

The reason this is the first fix is that it is not a fix to Photos. It is a fix to WIC, so it lands everywhere at once: Photos opens the file, File Explorer starts drawing thumbnails, and Paint can open one. One install, every WIC consumer on the machine.

Two details worth knowing before you go looking:

• It is not a Windows 11 feature. The listing’s minimum supported version is Windows 10 build 17763 - the October 2018 release - so the same package serves both.[2] Articles that tell you Windows 11 handles WebP natively and Windows 10 needs an add-on have the split in the wrong place. Both need the extension; Windows 11 machines are simply likelier to have picked it up already.
• It is maintained. When this article was written the listing showed the package updated eight days earlier, against a first release in May 2018.[2] If you meet the claim that Microsoft gave up on WebP, that is the check.

Do not install Google’s old codec instead

Older forum threads point at a separate “WebP Codec for Windows” installer from Google. Skip it, for two reasons.

Google does not publish it any more. The official WebP download page now offers libwebp developer archives and nothing else - no Windows imaging codec, no installer, no mention of Windows integration at all.[4] The links still circulating point at an unlinked legacy file.

The second reason is worse. The two codecs conflict, and WIC registers one codec per format for the whole system, so you cannot have both. On Microsoft’s own Q&A site a user describes the trade exactly: with Microsoft’s extension installed, WebP files open correctly in Paint but render very dark in Windows Photo Viewer, and installing Google’s legacy codec reverses it

• Photo Viewer correct, Paint refusing to open them at all.[3]

That is a user report and a community reply, not documentation - Microsoft has not described the behaviour either way, and this article is not going to pretend otherwise. But the dark-render complaint has been turning up on Microsoft’s own forums since 2020 and is still unanswered. It is also why “just use the old Windows Photo Viewer, it handles WebP” is advice that appears to work and then quietly hands you the wrong colours.

If you are on Windows 10, this is now the only first-party route

Plenty of the advice on this topic ends with “update Windows”. That stopped being available. Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025 and no longer receives software updates, security fixes or technical support outside the paid Extended Security Updates programme.[5] There is no future Windows 10 build that adds this.

The good news is that nothing here depends on one. The extension’s floor is build 17763, which any Windows 10 machine still running clears comfortably.[2] The Store package is the fix on Windows 10 and it will stay the fix.

When the Microsoft Store is blocked

On a work or school laptop the Store is often simply not there, and every article that ends at “install it from the Store” ends at a wall.

Microsoft documents how organisations do this - through Intune, a CSP policy or Group Policy, under Configure access to the Microsoft Store app.[6] If that is your machine, the block is deliberate and you are not going to argue with it from the user side.

The block does not make the codec unreachable, though. Only unreachable by you. The same page notes that devices managed by Intune can still install applications sourced from the Microsoft Store even when the Store app is blocked.[6] So this is a two-line request to whoever runs the machines rather than an impossibility, and the useful thing to put in that request is the package family name: Microsoft.WebpImageExtension_8wekyb3d8bbwe.

Until then, everything in the next three sections still works, because none of it needs the codec.

What installing the codec does not fix

Installing the extension teaches your computer to read WebP. It does nothing about anything else in the chain:

• The upload form that rejects the file. It never opened your image. It read the four characters after the dot and stopped. A codec on your machine is not visible to a server.
• The person you are sending it to. They have their own machine, with its own answer to this question, and telling someone to install a codec before they can see your photograph is not sending them a photograph.
• The print shop, the client, the old editor, the form that was written in 2016. Same shape.
• The animation, if it had one. An animated WebP is reported to display as a single static frame in Photos, described there by a Microsoft community moderator as incomplete WebP support rather than a damaged file.[8] The animation really is in the file
  • the format’s specification defines ANIM and ANMF chunks precisely for it[9] - and every browser on your machine will play it. Only the desktop shows you one frame.

So there are two different problems wearing one sentence. “I want to look at it” is solved by the codec. “I need to give it to somebody” is not solved by the codec at all, and needs an actual conversion.

Fix 2: convert the file you already have

Once the extension is installed, the shortest route is already on the machine: open the file in Paint, then File > Save as, and choose JPEG or PNG. One file, a few seconds, nothing uploaded anywhere. Microsoft does not document Paint’s WebP support as a feature of Paint, and it does not need to - Paint reads through WIC like everything else, so it inherits the format the moment the codec is there.

For a folder rather than a file, use an image viewer or editor that reads WebP and writes JPG in bulk, and convert once instead of forty times.

Online converters are the third option and they genuinely work anywhere, including on the locked-down laptop above. What they cost is that the image leaves your device for a server you do not control. That is a fine trade for a meme and a decision worth two seconds of thought for a photograph of a document or a picture of a child. The WebP problem, end to end weighs all five routes against each other, including that one.

Fix 3: stop the next one, at the moment you save it

Everything above is repair work. The reason you keep meeting this is that the download itself never had to be a WebP.

Your browser advertises WebP support on every image request, and the site’s image server answers accordingly - which means the format was chosen several seconds before you right-clicked, by two machines, neither of which was you. A browser extension can add the conversion step that Save image as… does not have, because the browser already contains an encoder: Chromium’s canvas encoder accepts image/jpeg, image/png and image/webp, and two of those three are what you are trying to get to.[10] (MIMETypeRegistry::IsSupportedImageMIMETypeForEncoding() is the list.) The decode and re-encode happen on your own machine, with no server involved. Which is the odd thing about the converter sites: the encoder they want you to upload to is already installed in the browser you downloaded the file with.

With Save Image As Type that is a right-click on the image, then Save Image As Type, then Save as JPG.

This does not help with the file you already have. An extension acts on images that are on a web page; a .webp sitting in your Downloads folder is not on a page, and no browser extension can reach it. Fix 1 or fix 2 is your answer for that file. This one is for every file after it, which on a Windows machine without the codec is the difference between solving this once and solving it weekly. Saving a WebP as JPG walks through what changes in that direction, including what happens to transparency.

No, renaming it to .jpg does not fix it

It is the most repeated advice on this topic and it has never worked.

A file’s name is not part of the file. WebP’s container specification puts the ASCII characters RIFF, a 32-bit size, then the ASCII characters WEBP at the very start of every WebP file.[9] Renaming photo.webp to photo.jpg changes the directory entry and not one byte of the image. A real JPEG starts FF D8 FF. Yours still starts RIFF.

It appears to work about half the time, which is what keeps it alive: software that identifies files by their contents opens the renamed file happily, because it was never reading the extension. Software that trusts the extension accepts it and then fails somewhere deeper, with a worse error. The WebP problem, end to end shows those bytes in a hexdump rather than asserting them.

Which fix do you actually need?

Windows is missing one free package, and that package solves less than it looks like it solves. It makes the format readable on your own machine. It does nothing to make the format acceptable to anyone else’s, and that second problem is the one that sent most people looking in the first place.

If you want the whole picture rather than the Windows corner of it - why the file arrived as a WebP at all, and every route out of it - start with the WebP problem, end to end. If you already know what you want out the other side, go straight to WebP to JPG for photographs or WebP to PNG for screenshots and transparency.