I don’t know what a .webp file is but I don’t like it. They’re like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you’re looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.

Edit: honestly I assumed it had something to do with Google protecting themselves from image piracy shit

  • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
    656·
    1 year ago

    It’s just a new picture format that is arguably better than jpeg in many scenarios. It has been around for many years. Windows just refuses to do file associations correctly, so people hate it for no reason.

  • Kabe@lemmy.world
    571·
    1 year ago

    The format actually has a lot of benefits - it supports transparency, animation, and compresses very efficiently. So it could theoretically replace GIF, JPG, and PNG in one fell swoop.

    The downsides are that many apps don’t currently support it and that it’s owned by Google.

    Personally I use webp for images that are not intended to share (e.g. banners and images on my blog), but stick to JPG/PNG for sending to other people.

    • Dark Arc@lemmy.world
      40·
      1 year ago

      and that it’s owned by Google.

      I mean yes, but it’s patent irrevocably royalty free (so long as you don’t sue people claiming WebM/P as your own/partially your own work), so it’s effectively owned by the public.

      Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of the WebM Specifications, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by implementation of the WebM Specifications. If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any implementation of the WebM Specifications constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under the License for the WebM Specifications shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. “WebM Specifications” means the specifications to the WebM codecs as embodied in the source code to the WebM codecs or any written description of such specifications, in either case as distributed by Google.

      Source: https://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/

      (But Dark, that’s WebM not WebP! – they share the same license: https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/g/webp-discuss/c/W4_j7Tlofv8)

        • Gerula@lemmy.world
          19·
          1 year ago

          You could still be on the fence. It’s Google so for sure it has the possibility of tracking or some other user exploiting bullshit feature but we haven’t figure it out yet.

            • minorninth@lemmy.world
              12·
              1 year ago

              It’s also just an open file format. Anyone could implement it, and in fact I found dozens of completely independent implementations of webp decoders on GitHub in various languages.

              There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.

              • _pete_@lemmy.world
                51·
                1 year ago

                There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.

                Sort of. Smaller images mean it’s less work for Google to crawl and index them, if every image is 40% smaller then that’s potentially saving them millions a year in storage and bandwidth costs.

                So, yea, it’s better for the web but it also massively benefits them.

                • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  Well, they crawl and index anyways. I see no harm done with .webp. One of my friends said with .webp you can’t save an image because it stops you from doing that somehow? I’m unsure, maybe true maybe not.

              • Gerula@lemmy.world
                11·
                1 year ago

                Open source just like Chromium or Android, right? They’re open source also, right?

              • Gerula@lemmy.world
                12·
                1 year ago

                Open source just like Chromium or Android, right? They’re open source also, right? 😈

                • minorninth@lemmy.world
                  3·
                  1 year ago

                  I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

                  Chromium and Android really are open-source. There are hundreds of products like Electron and Fire OS built on top of them without any involvement or consent from Google.

                  Just because Google Chrome and Pixel phones have some proprietary code doesn’t mean that Android and Chromium aren’t open.

    • Laticauda@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I wouldn’t have an issue with them if they weren’t so incompatible with most of the programs and sites I like to use. It makes them super inconvenient to work with. I know some apps are catching up and supporting them, but it feels like the adaptation is slow and patchy which makes it difficult to know which programs will support webp at some point and when.

          • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
            5·
            1 year ago

            libpng refused to accept it

            mozilla made it because it suited their needs; and libpng (the organisation behind png, and who make the standard png decoder[1]) refused to add compatibility, insisting on mng instead. mng was bad, so nobody used it; and apng was great, but require mozillas version of the decoder so systems couldn’t use both the official version and the apng supporting version together

            1. and have a fantastic website ↩︎

              • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                partly, i don’t think it was just that. mng did have considerable benefits over apng at the time; but it was a solution looking for a problem. i think they wanted it to succeed because they’d poured time into it, but nobody wanted to support it (mozilla, the only browser to support it to my knowledge, dropped support eventually because the mng decoder was bigger than every other image decoder in firefox put together)

          • Aux@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 year ago

            To add to the reply you got, WebP is lossy. Meaning that WebP files are smaller. APNG only added animation and nothing else.

      • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        mp4 isn’t generally for images.

        Yes you can convert, it’s just that many existing tools may not presently support webp. If you just want a quick & dirty meme you can always screen cap.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
          3·
          1 year ago

          The fun thing is heif is actually effectively single frame of h.265 video because the amount of work that’s gone into making h.265 space efficient also happens to work really well for efficienct compression of individual frames of video aka images

  • Polar@lemmy.ca
    533·
    1 year ago

    You would like it if you had slow internet, or you hosted a website.

    My website turned 5MB images into 100KB images using webp. My website now loads instantly, saves you bandwidth, and me costs!

      • 9point6@lemmy.world
        204·
        1 year ago

        Yep! Not least of all, GIF & JPEG are over 30 year old formats and WebP is about a decade old. So there’s at least 20 years of advancement there

        • TheOPtimal@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          21·
          1 year ago

          JPEG-XL has been out for three years, and is better and more efficient than any other image format on the market. Google just has been insisting on keeping them off the web because they want to push WebP instead.

            • noobg@lemmy.world
              1·
              1 year ago

              I’d bet on WEBP simply because it was first out of the gate. Even though JXL is likely a better overall solution, it might arrive too late to dethrone WEBP. I’m already seeing WEBP in lots of places.

            • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              1 year ago

              I think webp has already “won”, because google refuses to have jxl support in chrome, the web browser most of the people use.

              Apart from that, if I’ll have a website I’ll aim to support jxl and the old formats, but webp not even by mistake.
              Why? I think this is yet another thing with which google wants to be everywhere for this or that reason and I’m fed up with that.

        • bouh@lemmy.world
          123·
          1 year ago

          That means absolutely nothing. We went to the moon with hardware that had ram in kilobytes. Today you need a supercomputer from the 70s to run the add of a Web page.

          Progress is not linear. C is still used everywhere while some other languages didn’t live a tenth of its age. New is not always better.

          • 9point6@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yeah for sure, new is not always better.

            Though for compressed media file formats, that pretty much has been the correlation for a while (though obviously there’s many different conflicting qualities that can make a file format “good” for various purposes)

            Take video for example: MPEG2 came along and MPEG quickly became uncommon within a couple of years. MPEG4 displaced MPEG2 due to being more efficient. DivX/AVC replaced that for the same reasons and HVEC/VP9 replaced that. We’ve got AV1 coming now that looks to have beaten h.266/VVC to the punch, but it’s still a fairly linear progression of improvement.

            Given all that it’s kind of mad we’ve not seen the same level of iteration on image file formats, but that’s almost entirely down to browser wars and having to pick lowest common denominators. JPEG2000 might have taken off if it wasn’t for the fact only Apple ever implemented it in a browser—it was definitely a technically better format.

            • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              1 year ago

              and HVEC/VP9 replaced that

              I wouldn’t say that. Maybe youtube uses it by default (I don’t know, though) but a lot of other sites still use H264.

              And I don’t see AV1 even on the horizon.
              A couple of years ago (2?) I tried converting some of my huge H264 video files to AV1 with then up to date ffmpeg. It was horrendously slow. I don’t remember the numbers but I’m pretty sure it was progressing much slower than the clock.

            • bouh@lemmy.world
              1·
              1 year ago

              It’s due to the maths behind. Special algebra is used for video compression, and a discovery has been made something like 15 years ago that allows a better video compression. It fueled technical progresses of the last years.

              For images, we basically hit the wall quite some time ago. The new technologies are more about engineering improvement than math improvement.

              Then there is the technical environment. It doesn’t matter if your technology is a bit better than the old one because the cost to change the whole technical environment is insane. That’s why ipv4 is still there for example. Changing everything for a new technology to be used is a long, costly and painful progress. But this is something only developpers can’t cope with, because the development culture is painfully ignorant of industry constraints and time lines.

              • Beliriel@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Lol I still don’t really understand ipv6 and I work in IT. Ipv4 is so much easier and nicer to work with

      • arandomuser@lemmynsfw.com
        73·
        1 year ago

        Absolutely not. 5mb is what his phone spit out and it could trivially have been reduced to a 100kb easily as a jpeg

    • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
      84·
      1 year ago

      5mb to 100kb is not a typical result, so I would imagine that you are comparing apples to oranges (e.g. a very high quality jpeg vs a low quality webp)

  • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
    441·
    1 year ago

    Webp is a fairly standard if rather new image format, that are frequently used by websites due to their small file size. To further cut bandwidth costs and loading time, websites will often only include a tiny webp of an image until you click to expand or something like that, so that they don’t have to serve a massive image if the user will only even see a thumbnail sized preview. However, this does break the “save image” button as if you try to download the thumbnail, say from google images.

    Completely separately, some scummy sites will make you sign up for an account or something to download a full size image, and the only advice I have here is that it is almost always faster to find another site with the image then jump though the hoops.

  • dezmd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    488·
    1 year ago

    Just a way for Google to influence and force change on end users away from previously accepted standards, a strategy that allows them to further obfuscate attempts to DRM all media to make sure only authorized parties can play in the sandbox. Don’t worry, they’re trying to move the entire browser that way as well. Mandatory ads and mandatory DRM that can scan your cache and local files for possible violations are coming right goddamn behind it all.

    WEBP is effectively a container format warped into a media compression format, it’s strength that’s actively exploited is obviously in saving a little bandwidth by (further) compressing and serving smaller sized cached webp files of existing jpg/png/gif/etc files to end users.

    PNG (and JPG for that matter) has worked just fine for static image files for decades, but that was a community project created to work around the patent encumbrance of GIF so there’s not money to be made and nothing to embrace/extend/extinguish by the big patent happy corps by allowing it to retain status as a ‘standard’ in active use. Bandwidth, processing power, and storage have come a long way since PNG started giving us better quality than JPG’s inconsistent compression artifacts.

    /waves old man cane around in the air in a threatening manner

  • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
    336·
    1 year ago

    Google being fucking Google.

    I downloaded the Save By Type extension because it was impossible to some of my schoolwork this term due to the webp BS.

    • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
      71·
      1 year ago

      Dont blame google, it is Mucrisoft’s fault for refusing to support them under default windows. The format itself is in many ways superior to both PNG and JPEG.

      • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
        11·
        1 year ago

        If one company is pushing something (google) and several others have trouble with it (MS, Apple, Adobe) then maybe the pusher is to blame for issues?

        • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
          22·
          1 year ago

          Gimp, who’s developmental team consists of a bunch of volunteers supports it, the reasons those companies don’t support is is either because they don’t care about users (Adobe), or because they are pushing their own, proprietary format. (Apple) Microsoft directly competes with Google in the cloud ecosystem space and therefore wants to make using Google as painful as possible. (See microsoft making it a huge pain to switch the default browser to chrome)

          • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
            11·
            1 year ago

            See microsoft making it a huge pain to switch the default browser to chrome

            Are you high? Chrome dominates the browser market. This is such a blatantly terrible argument.

  • tvmole@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    271·
    1 year ago

    Why do so few apps (besides browsers) seem to support it? E.g. Win10 photo viewer and seemingly all my messaging apps

    The format itself sounds good, and I see it everywhere online, but is there some reason it’s unsupported?

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
    196·
    1 year ago

    I don’t know what they are other than a file format; but I also don’t know what everyone’s problem with them is. They open in every viewer or editor I’ve used just fine so you can convert them by just saving as a new format if you’re trying to reupload them somewhere.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
      111·
      1 year ago

      My gripe with them is that MacOS Finder won’t generate thumbnail previews of them and just displays a generic image icon. You’re free to say “that’s dumb, fuck Apple,” but I hope it illustrates a widespread example of how they’re aren’t as easy to deal with as JPGs and PNGs.

  • prayer@lemmy.world
    12·
    1 year ago

    This seems like the crowd to have ffmpeg installed. Ffmpeg will convert webp to jpeg real easy, don’t even need to specify a converter.

  • Gamey@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 year ago

    It’s a image format with extremely good compression that’s tiny doesn’t look bad. As someone who had shitty internet for years I definitely welcome them but as usual with Googles inventions they push it on to everyone and let other browsers catch up.

  • WeebLife@lemmy.world
    101·
    1 year ago

    Usually you can inspect the web page and find the original jpg to download. Its annoying though.

  • Whisper06@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    91·
    1 year ago

    You can take them into GIMP (or probably any image editing software) and turn them into png or what have you.

      • oatscoop@midwest.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        The webp package does it too. You can make a script and add it to your right click “open with” options

        #!/bin/bash
# Convert .webp to .png
outfile="${1%.webp}.png"
dwebp $1 -o $outfile

        if you want to use Magick, replace the last line with

        convert $1 $outfile
    • 823r0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      36·
      1 year ago

      Or use “save as” and replace the “.webp” extension with “.jpeg” in the file dialog.

  • zeppo@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    They’re a pain in the ass sometimes because I can’t say, download one and send them in certain chat programs. But you can use a program like Gimp to convert them easily.