Chrome Saves Images as WebP — Here's How to Get JPG

You right-click an image, choose Save image as, and end up with a .webp file. You cannot attach it to certain emails, an older program refuses to import it, and the upload form on some marketplace rejects it outright.

Almost every guide about this starts by telling you how to stop Chrome converting your images. That framing is wrong, and it is why so many of the suggested fixes do not work reliably. Chrome is not converting anything.

What is actually happening

When Chrome loads a web page, it tells the server which image formats it can handle. Modern servers and CDNs read that and send back the most efficient format the browser accepts — usually WebP, because it is typically 25 to 35 percent smaller than an equivalent JPG, which makes pages load faster.

So by the time you right-click, your browser is holding a WebP. When you save, it writes to disk exactly what it received. There is no conversion step to turn off, and no Chrome setting that changes this, because the decision was made on the server before the image ever reached you.

This also explains something people find baffling: the image URL might end in .jpg and the file still saves as .webp. Many CDNs keep the original filename and swap the format transparently. The extension in the URL is a leftover label, not a promise about the bytes.

Firefox and Edge behave the same way. This is not a Chrome quirk.

Two consequences follow, and they matter for choosing a fix:

• The original JPG may still exist on the server, but you were not sent it.
• Any fix that gives you a JPG is either fetching a different file or converting the WebP you already have.

Fix 1: Convert the file you already have

The most reliable option, and the one that works every time regardless of how the site is set up.

Save the image as normal, then convert the WebP to JPG. It takes a few seconds, and if you download images regularly it becomes a reflex: save everything, then convert the batch in one pass at the end.

Our tools run the conversion in your browser rather than on a server, so nothing is uploaded and there is no limit on how many files you do at once. If the images are also too large for wherever they are going, the image compressor will handle both jobs in the same step.

The one honest caveat: you are converting a WebP, not recovering the original JPG. The site's WebP was itself generated from an original, so you are two lossy generations away from the source. In practice this is invisible for normal use. For print or archival work, it matters, and you should try Fix 3 first.

Fix 2: Use a browser extension

Extensions like Save Image As Type add options to the right-click menu so you can choose JPG or PNG directly. The extension converts the image on the fly.

Convenient if you save images constantly. Two things to keep in mind. It is still a conversion, so the quality caveat above applies. And image-context extensions can see the pages you visit, so install one with a real user base and check what permissions it asks for rather than taking the first result in the store.

Fix 3: Try to get the original file

Sometimes the untouched JPG is still sitting on the server and you can reach it. These tricks are worth trying when quality genuinely matters, but none of them work everywhere — they depend entirely on how that specific site serves images.

Strip the format suffix. Some CDNs append the format to the URL, like example.com/photo.jpg.webp or example.com/photo.webp. Removing the .webp part sometimes returns the original. Do not add .jpg in its place; just remove.

Add a query string. Appending something like ?original to the URL can bypass a cached WebP variant on certain configurations. This is unreliable and depends on the CDN's caching rules.

Look for the source elsewhere. If it is a product photo, the seller's own listing or press kit often has the original. If it is your own image on a platform you control, download it from the admin side rather than from the public page — Shopify, WordPress and most CMSes serve the original file there, not the CDN-optimised variant.

If none of these work, the site is simply not offering the original, and Fix 1 is your answer.

What does not work

Renaming the file. Changing photo.webp to photo.jpg does not convert anything. The extension is a label; the bytes inside are still WebP. Programs that read the file header will reject it, and the ones that trust the extension will fail in a more confusing way. Conversion means decoding and re-encoding, which renaming does not do.

Looking for a Chrome setting. There isn't one. Chrome does not expose a way to refuse WebP, because that negotiation happens in a request header that is not user-configurable through the interface. Any guide promising a settings toggle is describing something that does not exist.

Turning off image optimisation. Some articles suggest disabling a Chrome flag or a data-saver feature. These affect Chrome's own behaviour on some platforms, not what a third-party server chooses to send you.

Should you avoid WebP entirely?

For your own use, probably not. WebP opens in every current browser, in Windows 11 natively, and in most modern image software. If the file is going onto a website, WebP is the better format and converting it to JPG makes your page slower for no benefit.

Convert when something downstream demands it: an older desktop program, a print service, a marketplace that only accepts JPG and PNG, or a client who will open it on software from a decade ago. That is a compatibility decision, not a quality one.

The short version

Chrome saves what the website sent. The website sent WebP because it is smaller and your browser said it could handle it. There is no setting to change, so either convert the file you have, install an extension that converts it for you, or hunt for the original on the server. For almost everyone, converting is the fastest route and the difference in quality is not something you will see.