Participant

P: Forces All WebP Files to Open in ACR With No Way to Disable

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
February 20, 2026
25 replies
1263 views

Camera Raw 18.2 forces all WebP files to open in ACR. Version 18.1.1 did not support WebP, so Photoshop opened them normally. Now there’s no way to disable WebP handling.

Please add a toggle.

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AxelMatt

Community Expert

Thread closed because double post.

Further discussion here: Add "Disable WEBP support" to Camera Raw's file handling settings | Adobe DME

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 8 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI

Bev A.

Inspiring

That link does not work, it goes to a closed discussion. This is the discussion.

jane-e

Community Expert

@Bev A. wrote: That link does not work, it goes to a closed discussion.

The post from Axel that you replied to was later merged by someone to this primary thread. Unfortunately, the new forum software does not recognize the merge and simply takes users to a “page not found” URL instead of updating the link as the old software did.

The link from Axel was a good link when he made it five days ago.

Jane

Kris Hunt

Legend

Forcing WEBP files to open in Camera Raw seems like utter nonsense to me, but if you’re determined to allow Camera Raw to open them, you absolutely must add an option to disable WEBP support in the Camera Raw's file handling settings as you have done with other file formats.

You forgot something...

Kris Hunt

Legend

Forcing WEBP files to open in Camera Raw seems like utter nonsense to me, but if you’re determined to allow Camera Raw to open them, you absolutely must add an option to disable WEBP support in the Camera Raw file handling settings as you have done with other file formats.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Indeed it does, and that happened after the ACR 18.2 update.

I tested this prior to the update, when I first saw this post, and then it opened directly into Photoshop.

Now, that would make sense if there was a webp option in this section in ACR preferences, but there isn’t:

Opening lossy compressed formats into ACR isn’t as dumb as you think. ACR doesn’t recompress since all edits are just stored as metadata, so you don’t get cumulative degradation. Of course, the best thing is to not resave compressed formats at all. Make a new one from the uncompressed master file.

Kris Hunt

Legend

Ah, but resaving compressed formats isn’t necessarily as dumb as you think. I save a full size version of every image, and then use a batch action to resize them to thumbnails and save them as webp again. Any existing compression vanishes away after resizing.

Kris Hunt

Legend

As of today, all .webp files open in Camera Raw instead of Photoshop. Apparently this is a new feature. This is insane. Who would want to use Camera Raw to modify heavily compressed web images in the first place? And then to make matters worse, it generates a sidecar file, even if you close out of Camera Raw without making any changes. How can I disable this completely?

I even went in to Photoshop’s Settings > File Handling window and unchecked “Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for Supported Raw Files”, and it did nothing. What. The. Hell.

anton_3595

Participant

I found a workaround by recording an action that uses “Open As” with a WebP file. Then you can create a droplet from that action and simply drag files onto it.

It’s not ideal, but works for now.

Bev A.

Inspiring

What worked for me is from Camera Raw interface bottom right, click “Open” dropdown, and select “Open as Copy”, is that what you meant? And yes, it’s a PITA, but it works.

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