Cory Gunther

How-to

How to edit WebP files in Photoshop

Need to work with those pesky WebP files from around the web? We show you how to get them to open in Photoshop.

A person sitting at a computer using Photoshop.
Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Are you trying to edit WebP files in Photoshop, but it's telling you that it's an unsupported file format? Guess what: us too.

Don't worry though, the fix is pretty straightforward.

What is WebP?

It's an increasingly popular file format developed by Google to reduce the size of images while maintaining as much quality as possible.

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What you need

is one simple Photoshop plugin.

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For starters...

Photoshop doesn't natively support WebP files, so what you need is a plugin to add that support. The developers at The WebM Project have created just such a plugin, thankfully, so all you need to do is install it.

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For Mac users:

- Unzip the file

- Move the extracted file to the Photoshop plug-in directory (Applications/Adobe Photoshop/Plug-ins/)

- Restart Photoshop if you have it open

Note: On macOS 10.15+, you may see the prompt "WebPShop.plugin cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified"

Tap to the next slide to see how to fix this...

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In Terminal

To bypass the verification error, run (copy/paste) the following command in Terminal (Finder > Applications > Utilities):

sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 2021/Plug-ins/WebPShop.plugin

Now, run Photoshop.

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It's beautiful

Look, a WebP file in Photoshop!

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For Windows users:

- Download the plugin from WebM's GitHub.

- Move the plug-in (the .8bi binary for Windows) to the Photoshop plug-in directory (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop\Plug-ins\)

Now, run Photoshop and you're all set.

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We're all done

It's that easy. Now, enjoy a better Photoshop experience.

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