How to save a WebP image as PNG in Chrome

You find an image you need, right-click it, choose Save image as, and Chrome gives you a perfectly good .webp file. Then the place you need to use it wants PNG. That is the whole problem.

WebP is not some broken image format. It is usually smaller than PNG or JPG, and that is why so many sites use it. But a lot of everyday workflows still ask for PNG: a slide deck, an image editor, a CMS field, or an older app that has not caught up. Renaming the file does not convert it. It just gives the wrong file a new label.

What Chrome can do by itself

Chrome can download the original image. If the source is WebP, the download is WebP. There is no hidden Save as PNG option in the standard image menu, and that is sensible. A browser download should preserve the original file, not quietly change it.

If you only need the image once, you can open the downloaded file in Preview, Paint, Photoshop, or another image editor and export it as PNG. That works. It is also more steps than this small job deserves.

The quick conversion options

There are three reasonable paths. Use an image editor when you need to crop, retouch, or inspect the image anyway. Use a local desktop converter if you have a folder full of files. And use a browser converter when the image is already open in Chrome and you just want the right format.

For that last case, I built Save Image As. It adds a Save Image As entry to Chrome's image context menu. Pick PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, or PDF and it converts the image in the browser before downloading it. There is no upload step and no image service in the middle.

Saving a WebP image as PNG with Save Image As

1. Install Save Image As from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Right-click the image you want on any webpage.
3. Choose Save Image As... from the context menu.
4. Choose PNG and the file downloads in that format.

That is it. The useful part is not that it is technically difficult. It is that the conversion happens where the image already is, without turning a quick save into a trip through another website.

One limitation worth knowing about

Some sites restrict how their images can be fetched from a page. When that happens, browser security rules can prevent any extension from reading the image for conversion. Save Image As handles the common cases, but a heavily restricted image may still need to be downloaded first and opened in an editor.

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The best tools remove the tiny annoyances you have stopped noticing. Saving a WebP as PNG is not a grand problem. But if you do it often, it should take one right-click, not a detour.