You just spent the last hour searching images on Google looking for the perfect picture to punctuate your presentation only to find out that Google Slides won’t support it because the filetype is .webp. Before you give up completely and waste another hour looking for a new image, there’s a very easy way to convert these files into something Google Slides will accept.
Someone on the Google Slides team is having a joke at our expense, because Google originally created the WebP format as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF files. They forgot to add support for WebP to most of their products. It is supported in almost every browser, but rarely works in apps like Google Slides and PowerPoint where people like you and I add images to our presentations on a regular basis.
After you’ve downloaded the file to your computer, skip ahead the steps for below for the type of computer you have.
Converting .webp files on Windows
The fastest way for Windows users to convert .webp files to something Google Slides can accept is to start by right-clicking the file and choosing Paint from the Open With menu. I like Paint for this because it comes with every Windows computer and doesn’t require installing any additional software.
Once you have the file open in Paint, choose Save As from the FIle menu. Paint will give you a choice of file types you can save. My preference is to use PNG. Once you saved the PNG to your computer, you can drag it into your Google Slides presentation just like you would any other image file.
Converting .webp Files on a Mac
Apple has supported .webp files in several versions of macOS, where you can easily convert them using Preview. Just open the file either using control-click menu and choosing Open With and choosing Preview or double-clicking the file (unless you changed your preferences, Preview is the default app for .webp files).
Once the file is open in Preview, choose Export from the File menu and keep the format set to PNG. This creates a new PNG file you can drag and drop into your Google Slides presentation.
Converting .webp Files on an iPhone or iPad
If you are trying to work on your Google Slides presentation from the iPhone or iPad app, .webp files can be really confusing. They save to your Photos app and show up as an image. When you try to Insert Image in Google Slides, nothing happens – you don’t even get an error message.
The best option I’ve found for dealing with .webp files on iPhone or iPad is to open the file in Photos, choose Save to Files from the share menu and save the image somewhere in the Files app you can easily find it again. This should convert the file to a .jpeg file that Google Slides can recognize.
On an iPhone you need to re-import the file you just saved back into the Photos app so that Google Slides will let you choose the image using the Insert Image feature. On iPad, you can use split screen mode and drag the .jpeg from Files to the Google Slides app.
