You right-click an image in Google search, hit "Save image as..." — and it's a .webp file. Your photo viewer can't open it. PowerPoint won't import it. What happened to good old JPG? Here's why Google does this and exactly how to work around it.
Google created WebP in 2010, and they've been aggressive about adopting it across their products. Chrome, YouTube thumbnails, the Play Store, Google Photos — and yes, Google Images — all serve WebP by default. The reason is simple math:
It's not malicious — it's infrastructure economics. But it's annoying when you just want a JPG you can actually use.
Windows Photos didn't support WebP until Windows 10 version 1809, and even then it was buggy. Older Macs need a plugin. Photoshop needed a separate plugin until 2022. Most "default" image viewers across operating systems still don't handle WebP smoothly in 2026. Google saved bandwidth — you inherited the compatibility problem.
Save the WebP file, then drag it into WebP2PNG. Convert to PNG or JPG in one click. Everything happens in your browser — your file never leaves your computer, and the output is a standard format every app supports.
Sometimes Google Images serves a JPG with a WebP wrapper. Look at the image URL. If you see ?format=webp or similar, try removing that parameter. Doesn't always work, but worth a try.
Crude but effective: zoom the image to full size in the search results, take a screenshot, and crop. You'll lose some resolution but get a universally-compatible PNG.
Right-click → "Open image in new tab." Sometimes this loads the original source format (especially if the image is hosted on a non-Google site) rather than Google's cached WebP version. If it still shows WebP, the site itself is serving it.
No. If anything, they're pushing AVIF even harder now — it's 20-30% smaller than WebP. The trend is toward newer, more efficient formats, not backward compatibility. The practical solution isn't to fight it — it's to keep a converter handy for the files you need in standard formats.