How can I prevent webp files from opening in Camera Raw?

Forum|Forum|2 days ago
February 20, 2026
3 replies
111 views

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.

Caveman96

Participant

The only way I was able to work around it was to roll back to Photoshop 27.3.1 and Camera Raw 14.5.

D Fosse

Community Expert

You don’t need to go as far back as Camera Raw 14.5. That’s a long time ago. Version 18.1 is far enough, one dot update back. Camera Raw 18.1 did not open webp directly (as I said in my previous post).

amarney

Participant

Same. I don’t see anything in Preferences → Camera Raw to prevent this, either.

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 HuntAuthor

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.

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