what are .webp files and why has my online experience been plagued by them?

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.

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!

You only dislike it because whatever bad app you're using to share them on doesn't support them.

Stop being the gullible fool and start hating the apps not the file format.

Edit: I also spot your .gif favouritism in there. .gif is an archaic and wasteful format, and asking for it is the same as looking at your car and whining that the fuel has no lead.

Webp is an image format.

Jpg is ancient, and gif, holy shit gif is from stone age.

I dunno, if you're playing a video, you probably want x264 or better these days, no? For music, we use some variant of mp4 or lossless at this point.

Yet with pictures, for some reason we insist on the old shitty stuff.

Using jpeg or gif is like using mp1 for music and VideoCD for video. Come on now.

The only problem with webp is that there's quality loss if you convert an already compressed jpeg into webp with high compression rate, like some web sites do. That can suck, but I don't know how else to get people to use more modern formats. Otherwise we'd be using ancient formats into the 24th century.

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.

Here's a Firefox extension that adds right-click context menu options to save the webp as PNG or JPEG:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/save-webp-as-png-or-jpeg/
and its GitHub page:
https://github.com/jscher2000/Save-webP-as-extension

Makes it a bit easier than downloading the webp and converting it.

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.

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.

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

Can someone give me an example where webp gets in the way? I've been using it for a while and both macOS and Windows seem to support the format without any third party extensions for a while now and so do the Affinity apps.

I can use webp like any other image format at this point.

Webp is a more modern image standard built for the web. Gif has major limitations, and animated gifs are actually bigger in size and worse quality than video files - these days, very few gifs you see on the web are actually .gif files. A while back imgur started converting them to mp4 behind the scenes.

Webp was built with animation in mind, so it works like gif and with much better file size. Even though it's relatively new it should have decent support in most programs that have been updated in the last few years - so you shouldn't necessarily have to jump through hoops to use it.

WebP is awesome (JPEG-XL is awesomer though). It compresses better than JPEG which was introduced 30(!) years ago. It's time for JPEG to go away.

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?

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.

I didn't know this either.

"Google launched the WebP format as part of its mission to make loading times faster across the internet. WebP allows websites to display high-quality images — but with much smaller file sizes than traditional formats such as PNG and JPEG."

I hate them because my image viewer of choice doesn't support them and never will because supposedly the developer died and never released the source.

webp is cool, but I much prefer JPEG-XL

Since nobody’s mentioned it yet, GIMP is a free and open source photo editor available on Mac, Windows, and Linux that can open .webp files and save them as a different file format easily.

Image file format with excellent compression. It’s designed for web browsers, so what you’re probably running into is compatibility with other programs. It’s fairly easy to convert though to GIF or JPEG formats though.

It's an image format ghat saves a lot of data. I use it all the time to save space!

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.

It's a newer image file format. You could think of it as a "better" version of a GIF or PNG. It compresses to a smaller file size with better quality, so lots of sites are using it now to speed up image loading without sacrificing quality.

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.

I stick to png

All programs that I use support them - what are these ancient apps that don't?

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.

Here’s a tip: a lot of websites actually store and serve multiple copies of an image in different formats because not all browsers support newer formats. If you change the name of the file you’re viewing in the browser from .webp to .jpg, chances are you’ll see a jpeg version of the same image provided by the same server.

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

Newer and better format then PNG/gif/etc. The downside is that not all image viewers or file explorers support it yet, though it's not exactly new either.

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

Not sure but it works everywhere except texting, so I can't text my memes

A good video I found on the topic : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=68H1H6Z_gz4

Eh, is a file format opinionated now?!

supposedly it's a better format. in practice it's worse, and support is so low in most applications that it's bad. but google forces what it wants, so that means when it can give you a webp, it will to encourage adoption.

there are cases where alternative file formats can really be better: matroska, for example. webp is not better, however.

I use jscher2000/Save-webP-as-extension to make it bearable:

Firefox extension to overlay format and JPEG quality buttons on inline or stand-alone images for quickly saving a converted version of the image.

Curiously enough, the only place where I've encountered WEBP files has been AI image generators. They usually offer PNG as an alternate format.

In my personal experience, when downloading .webp files I wasn't able to upload to the places I needed to much of the time. But I've always been able to just slap .jpg to the end of the file name as I used the save as function and that would make it work everywhere just fine.

Annoying, I have been renaming files to .jpg and can get around some of the crap.

It's just a modern image format. What do you mean you need to make hoops to do anything with it? Unless you are using some old, outdated software you should be able to do everything with it just like with good old .png's or jpg's.