simpsonsshitposting

Simply changing the extension wouldn't work because each image type has a specific header - even changing a .png to .jpg wouldn't work - and organizes the actual image data in different ways.

The header is what actually identifies the file type. For webp, it's called the RIFF header and it must be 21 bytes (it's a standardized specification, btw). For jpeg, the header is only 2 bytes and has the values FF D8. In theory, this means that you could even rename the file to image.zip and, if you opened it in an appropriate program, it would read the header and still render it properly

If we made a list of things you could do, that would be on the list.

If that's the only thing that changed, the data in the file isn't changed, it's still a webp file not a jpg, it's just mislabeled now. I just tried it, Dolphin will let you do it but throw a dialog telling you it's not actually going to change the file, just the name. Some systems might be smart enough to recognize the intent and run a conversion program in the background. Feels like an Apple thing to do. Also feels kind of Pythonic.

A lot of image viewing software doesn't know what to do with the webp format so they'll try to load it and throw an error.