Can I disable webp browser detection? It's bad!

Store Design

Topic summary

Main issue: Automatic image format handling on Shopify is replacing uploaded animated WebP files with animated GIFs, resulting in worse quality and larger file sizes.

Details:

  • Original animated WebP files (~400 KB) look good locally and in Safari (which supports animated WebP). After upload, Shopify serves animated GIFs (~2.5 MB) that appear pixelated.
  • The goal is to disable Shopify’s browser-based format detection/auto-conversion and either force WebP delivery or keep the original format, while still using Shopify’s CDN (content delivery network).

Additional report:

  • A second participant notes Shopify-generated WebP versions are larger than their original compressed JPEGs, creating page load issues.

Open questions / status:

  • Is there a way to disable Shopify’s automatic format negotiation or serve the original file unchanged via the CDN?
  • Are there workarounds to ensure efficient animated WebP delivery within Shopify’s infrastructure?

Outcome: No solution or setting was provided in the discussion; the issue remains unresolved and ongoing.

Summarized with AI on January 6. AI used: gpt-5.
1

I uploaded some animated webp files I created of some videos. I compressed them down to around 400KB and they look great. When uploading to Shopify it makes or serves ugly, pixelated animated gif versions instead that around 2.5MB! I understand it tries to serve images based on browser compatibility but my web browser Safari does support animated webp files and I can view these animations perfectly fine when I host the files on a different server.

Is there a way to prevent Shopify from deciding for us which files to serve? I want to completely disable it.

I could upload the images to another server but then I would not be taking advantage of Shopify’s CDN.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

2

Did you find a solution to this?

I’m having a similar issue where the webp images shopify is creating are much larger than the compressed jpegs that I uploaded, causing page load issues.