Shopify now serves storefront images as WebP (a Google format) for faster load times via better compression. Right‑click “Save image as” often yields .webp files, which some desktop apps and external services can’t open or accept.
Reported impacts include difficulty reusing images for social media, ads, or mockups; hashed filenames; incompatibility with services that require JPG/PNG (e.g., WhatsApp’s og:image, some marketplaces, SSRS reports).
Official stance: the change will not be reverted. Staff‑suggested workarounds: use a browser that doesn’t support WebP (e.g., Safari) to download originals; append ?format=jpg or &format=jpg to image URLs; rename .webp to .jpg in Windows; or download originals from Admin (Products/Files).
Mixed results: older tips like changing the URL extension to .jpg or using format=jpg work for some but not others; some still get .webp.
Community options: Chrome extensions to save as JPG/PNG; macOS terminal conversion with dwebp; bookmarklets or custom extensions for bulk tasks. An image exporter app helps with product images but not customer‑uploaded order files.
Outstanding needs: a scalable way to bulk download (especially order uploads) as JPG, a native “download as JPG” option in orders, and broader compatibility guidance. Status: ongoing with no native toggle; feedback forwarded to Shopify.
At the same time I was reading the Shopify developers blog post about Webp and testing our pages, my boss called me to say he couldn’t download the photos for an ad like he normally does.
We can use the jpgs from our business software, so the small inconvenience this will cause is well worth our webpages loading much faster! Very happy that Shopify made this change. Hope you can find a good solution as well.