What is .webp exactly

Browser save-as-type to the rescue.

Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-converter/

Chrome too, but find it yourself if you are still using that.

thanks, i'll try this later!

Webp is actually a decent format, it's just that a certain desktop OS used by roughly 70% of people chooses to not support it

decent format
poorly supported
Hmm. I know what you mean but wide support is like 90% of the usefulness for a general image format.
- its kinda like linux, its great and everybody loves it
  but only 2% of people use it
  as lemmy shows those 2% realllllly like it.
many android applications including Facebook messenger don't support it either
Lemmy.world's android app doesn't fully support it. I frequently get broken link image and never get animation. I know it can work because the same posts work in the Thundarr Lemmy app.
- Is that what causes "the image is actually a web page" error when I try to view an image?
*It isn't as decent when you look at it's raw facts but for the web it's a step into future.
*Now behold of avif!
! please can we just get jxl for web finally...? !<
- at its* raw facts

Tl;Dr: PNG but better.

No.
- It losslessly compressed 150GB of my PNGs to 75GB, so I'd say it's definitely better space-wise.
- Yes.
  (Ok there might be a lossy mode but that is barely better than jpg via mozjpeg)
except its useless as an image
Hang all web devs
- Web devs will literally look at the standards, decide to do something wrong, then blame everyone else for not agreeing with them.

I really like WEBP.

It supports transparency, animations, and compression, and seems to look really good even with very strong compression. It's a shame that, despite it coming out 13 years ago, it's still barely supported by so much software.

Sounds to me like people need to stop supporting software that doesn't take the time to update. WEBP is great, and I haven't run into a single program that doesn't support it, personally.
- Adobe stack doesn't support it natively. That's a pretty big one.

ffmpeg -i file.webp file.png

It works?!
- Pretty sure ffmpeg is just black magic at this point.
But can it convert animated webp’s back into the gifs they’re based off of anyway? That’s what makes me really hate the webp standard. If I save an animated image as webp no video converter will touch it that I’ve found. I just want my gifs and mp4s back :(
- You can convert it to frames with imagemagick, then use ffmpeg to turn that into a gif:
  magick animated.webp frames.png
  ffmpeg -i frames-%d.png animated.gif
  EDIT, or with a single imagemagick command:
  convert -format gif file.webp file.gif
- ffmpeg -i file.webp file.mp4 probably works, ffmpeg is mainly a video program anyway

99% of the images I save are used as a desktop background at work for a day or two.

.webp doesn't work as a windows desktop background.....

I end up just screenshoting and cropping.

.webp is great until you need to use anything that wasn't built with it in mind. Lots of stuff just never bothered adding support.

You can just open it on paint and save as .png
- That's what I'd do on desktop for sure. (or for something particularly high res)
  I'm usually saving them from mobile, screen capping and using the crop tool that pops up is the quicker route.
  I don't care to keep the .webp then have to transform it every time I need another format.

ITT: people running win7

Based

It annoys me that Firefox won't autoplay animated webp, at least ones in Lemmy posts, unless I open a whole new tab just for the fucking .webp

Sounds like html issue tbh
do you have disable auto play video enabled?
- Nope, it doesn't even show the controls if I mouse over, no different options with a right click, as if it was a jpeg image instead of a small video. Also, that's the case with webm, not webp, but I guess my trouble is still valid? Dunno now

There is an easy fix though. Just open the image in Gimp and then export it as a jpeg or PNG.

Spending up to a minute or more opening a huge-ass program to just convert one single image doesn't seem exactly elegant to me. Maybe it's easy but it's also a bit of a pain.
- he's a Linux user doing stupid convoluted things for simple outcomes is kinda their thing
convert image.webp image.png in your terminal should do the trick, if you're on Linux
- i don't have a convert command, i usually just use ffmpeg though

Web pee

Where's the problem?

Webp images can be a pain in the ass to work with because many programs don't support them.
- Is this a Windows thing I'm too Linux to understand?
- Which programs don't support webp exactly?

Open with gimp -> export as -> export as png -> export

Select all file types instead of webp than save as .png
- Doesn't always work

I disabled webp in firefox and still had to get a secondary image converter extension to get around this format, I wish I could opt out forever.

Legitimately amazing compression for gifs, but isn't supported for shit outside of the browser it comes in, be it editing images or upload to older online galleries. Good luck to anyone who just renames the file format to png/jpeg, now you have no idea what's actually the correct format when you need it... I used to think that was a good idea, until I faced programs that would not run 'renamed' formats whatsoever.

What were you thinking with the whole extension renaming ruse?!
But anyway, I've done that too.
I think it's a matter of time. MP3s were not support by many tools when it first came out.

You know when you were a kid and the was a toy in a clamshell of plastic that was super hard to tear?

It's a bit like that, but with less chance of slicing your thumb open

Why are people converting .webp to png with a program!? Just rename the file with the .png extension and it'll work. Try it.

Every webp image I've wanted to save I just renamed the extension to png and it works fine.

Renaming an extension does not actually modify the contents of the file. Some software that supports webp may look at the contents and recognize it as webp and load it. But that’s not all software.
It’s a bad practice to do that. It’s like changing a .docx to .pdf and expecting it to be fine.
- It's absolutely not a great thing to do in general, however it does work since the file contents are apparently a modified png. And everything that I used to both look and modify it later including automated CLI level cropping commands seem to think it's a png.
  Since it works and hasn't broken anything, and nothing I have recognizes the webp extension, seems to be okay for this niche purpose.
This doesn't always work unfortunately.
It's a workaround but doesn't work if you try to open the image in Photoshop to edit it without the webp plugin.
- Photoshop supports it atm, not sure how recent it was added
Yes it would work, but their hex file would still be of webp's. But you can use a converter.

A pain in the ass. Up next is jpegXL. If it’s backwards compatible with jpeg, great. If it’s not, then it can fuck off too.

Still will require apps to be compatible with it, otherwise we are looking another case of webp problems

I like it in concept, but not in practice. Way too many programs inexplicably can't read it and it's annoying as shit.

Google invented .webp to save corporations lots and lots of bandwidth with the new reduced image size. Technically it's the choice of the site host to distribute images as .webp so Lemmy is a bit guilty as well for adopting the standard. I don't like Webp, for some reason they don't get treated as image files when you try to visit their source or open them in a windows file structure, instead it takes you to some shitty bloated webpage with more than just the image.

convert file.webp file.png

Problem solved.

Hope someone (Apple?) starts pushing JPEGXL though.