Convert JPG to WebP
WebP was designed as a direct replacement for JPEG and it does the job: at matched visual quality you should expect 25-35% smaller files, with noticeably cleaner edges and less of the blocky mosquito noise JPEG produces around text and hard lines. For a folder of camera shots destined for a website, this is the single highest-value conversion available.
Best for: Getting a photo shoot, product catalogue or blog's image library ready for the web.
What to know
- Your JPEG is already lossy, so re-encoding is generational loss. Quality 80-85 keeps this invisible; going below 70 will start to compound the artefacts already present.
- EXIF, the ICC colour profile and XMP are all carried across, so camera settings, copyright and colour accuracy survive.
- Rotation is handled properly: the EXIF orientation is baked into the pixels and the tag reset, so nothing ends up sideways.
About JPEG
The 1992 workhorse of digital photography, and still what almost every camera and phone writes by default.
- No transparency at all — every JPEG is a solid rectangle.
- Its 8x8 block transform shows as visible mosquito noise around hard edges and text.
- Every save re-quantises the image, so repeated edits degrade it generationally.
- Thirty years of compression research have happened since, and it uses none of it.
- Support:
- Every browser ever shipped.
- Transparency:
- None.
About WebP
Google's 2010 format, now the pragmatic default for the web: meaningfully smaller than JPEG and PNG, and supported everywhere that matters.
- Does both lossy and lossless, so it replaces JPEG and PNG with one format.
- Transparency in lossy mode — something JPEG cannot do and PNG pays dearly for.
- Encodes fast enough to convert hundreds of images without waiting around.
- Universal browser support since Safari 14 in 2020.
- Support:
- All current browsers, including Safari 14+ and Edge. Roughly 97% of users.
- Transparency:
- Full alpha, in both lossy and lossless modes.
Frequently asked questions
- How much smaller is WebP than JPG?
- At matched visual quality, typically 25-35% smaller. The gap widens on images with large flat areas or sharp edges, and narrows on dense, noisy texture. Resizing at the same time is what produces the really dramatic numbers — a full-resolution camera JPEG scaled to 1440px wide and converted commonly lands 85-95% smaller.
- Does converting JPG to WebP lose quality?
- Some, unavoidably — your JPEG has already discarded data, and re-encoding discards a little more. At quality 82 (the default here) this is not visible at 100% zoom. Quality 90+ is effectively indistinguishable if you want to be conservative.
- Does this keep EXIF data when converting JPG to WebP?
- Yes, and this is unusual — most browser-based converters silently drop it. EXIF, ICC colour profiles and XMP are extracted from the JPEG and written into the WebP container. Camera model, exposure settings, copyright and GPS data all survive. You can turn this off if you would rather strip metadata before publishing.
- Should I use WebP or AVIF for my website?
- WebP for most cases: it is faster to encode, has slightly wider support, and the quality gap is modest. Choose AVIF when file size matters more than anything and you can afford the slower encode, or serve both with a picture element and let the browser pick.
Related conversions
Converting from something else? Convert any image to WebP