How to Open .WebP Files in Photoshop

By Hongkiat Lim. in Photoshop. Updated on July 27, 2022.

WebP is a new image file format developed by Google. The main feature of this format is that it gives you a smaller file size compared to the conventional formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF.

The WebP format is good for its small size, however, when working on Photoshop, you won’t be able to open files with .webp extension, and you will be shown this error message shall you attempt.

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But every problem has a solution, and this one isn’t any different. With a simple workaround, you can enable your Photoshop to open, edit and even save images in .webp format. So, let’s take a look at the following easy steps to do just that.

How to open .webp images in Photoshop

Download the WebPShop plugin for your particular operating system.

Unzip the package.
Copy the extracted file into Photoshop’s plugin folder.

Quit or close and then re-open your Photoshop app.

Where is Photoshop’s Plugin folder?

Windows user – Copy WebPShop.8bi (in bin\WebPShop_0_3_2_Win_x64) into C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop\Plug-ins
Mac user – Copy the WebPShop.plugin file (in bin/WebPShop_0_3_2_Mac_x64) into Applications/Adobe Photoshop/Plug-ins. Enter your Mac’s password to verify if necessary.

That’s it. You should now be able to open, edit, and save images as .webp in Photoshop.

Troubleshoots for macOS users

If you encounter the message “WebPShop.plugin can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.“, here’s a simple fix to it:

Click the Apple logo on the top left of the menubar.
Select System Preferences, then click Security & Privacy.
Under the ‘General’ tab, click Allow Anyway to allow running of WebPShop.plugin.