It doesn't matter if you're looking for images for a personal/commercial project or to add a little extra color to your desktop, sooner or later you'll have to cross swords with image conversion. One of the formats that seems to cause the most confusion is WebP, developed by Google as an alternative to the classic PNG and JPG. In many cases we must adapt that content to a more familiar format, so if you want to know how to convert WebP to JPG, you're in the right place.
WebP: Where Does It Come From?
You've probably heard of the VP8 and VP9 video formats. YouTube made both its standard (first VP8, later VP9), and unless you use an extension like h264ify, that's what you'll get. But they are not actually original formats from Mountain View; rather, they were developed using On2 Technologies's technology, a company that Google bought for almost 125 million dollars in early 2010.
So where does WebP fit into all this? Basically, it's a derivative of VP8 designed for images. The WebM container covers audio and video, while WebP establishes itself as an alternative that has nothing to envy other formats, including lossless compression, transparency, and animation. Firefox and all flavors of Chromium support WebP out of the box, and the number of applications that open WebP keeps growing... but there's always that situation where we need to convert WebP to JPG. Today we'll explain how.
How to Convert WebP to JPG
Online - Convertio
Simpler, impossible: any casual WebP-JPG conversion process should be covered with the Convertio service. Search for the WebP image on your hard drive or use a direct URL link if the image is already loaded elsewhere. The free edition has a couple of extra seconds of delay, but there are no watermarks or anything like that. You can also convert several images at once, and to other formats like PNG or GIF.
Offline - Paint.NET
Or any other image editor with WebP support to be honest, but Paint.NET is a personal favorite due to its ease of use and freeware profile. Paint.NET added WebP compatibility starting with version 4.2.5, and it's enough to download and install its latest build. The rest is a matter of opening the WebP image and using "Save As", an option that also allows you to adjust quality and chroma subsampling.
Bonus Track - XnConvert
Free online solutions have limits, and Paint.NET doesn't support batch conversion, so... what's left? The answer is XnConvert, freeware for personal use. If you need to convert WebP to JPG in batches of dozens, or why not, hundreds of images at once, load the content in its interface and go straight to the output tab, where you can specify the format (JPG has several advanced parameters) and the destination of the files.
In Summary
Converting WebP to JPG is a simple, fast process, and most importantly, without any cost. There are no extreme technical demands either, beyond downloading a program if it's not already preinstalled. Good luck!
