WEBP to PDF

Because the PDF format has no WEBP image type. It understands JPEG streams and a handful of lossless encodings, and WEBP is not among them. The picture is therefore decoded and rewritten as JPEG or PNG, which every PDF reader made in the past twenty years can open.

JPEG for photographs, PNG for screenshots, logos, diagrams and anything with transparency or sharp edges. The automatic setting already follows that rule using the file's own type, so most people never need to touch it. PNG pages are larger but never lose a pixel.

Because WEBP compresses better than the formats a PDF can store. The same picture re-encoded as JPEG or PNG takes more bytes. Running the finished document through PDF compression afterwards usually recovers a good part of the difference.

It is kept if the page is encoded as PNG, which is what the automatic setting does for any image with an alpha channel. If you force JPEG, transparent areas are filled with white or black, your choice, and the result tells you how many images were affected.

Only the first frame goes into the PDF, because a PDF page is a still image. The file is scanned before conversion, so you are told how many frames the animation had. To keep every frame, extract them as separate images first and add them as pages.

Chrome 32 and later, Firefox 65 and later, Edge 18 and later, and Safari 16 and later. On an older browser the decoder is missing entirely, and you are offered a converter that turns the WEBP into a JPEG first instead of being left stuck.

Pages follow the order in which the files were added, so drop them in the order you want. To rearrange them afterwards, open the finished PDF in the page organiser and drag the pages around, or remove and re-add the images.

Lower the JPEG quality slider before converting, or send the finished document to PDF compression, which downsamples the images inside it. Setting page size to A4 also helps, because oversized photos are scaled down to fit the sheet.