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.

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)
- Thank you for this. I was kind of on the fence because of its ties to google but this helps a ton.
And here comes jpegXL claiming the same things. Fun times.
- Okay, but jpeg xl is looking pretty good. Especially the ability to losslessly convert jpg to jxl.
  Recent conversation on lemmy.world and an article about it.
- https://xkcd.com/927/
- JPEG XL came after WebP. It's more of a successor and less of a competitor.
  That said, in the world of standards, a successor is still a competitor.
- Jpegxl will die because it has a bad name, that's it
Potientially dumb question here, but how does Google own a file format? They own the patent?
- I think so, but I'm no expert on the details of legal ownership.
  @Dark_Arc@lemmy.world added a good comment here that explains the royalty free licensing.
- look up mp3 -- that didn't become public domain until pretty recently (I think 2017?)
  not an uncommon thing really
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.
So basically what APNG tried to be?
- APNG is lossless.
That's a great idea. But can't webp simply be converted into a png or mp4 file?
- 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.

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!

Wait really? Are they that much more efficient?
- 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
- Absolutely not. 5mb is what his phone spit out and it could trivially have been reduced to a 100kb easily as a jpeg
- No.
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)

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.

The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling
- The terminology is sticking around longer than the format, too! Love me some (webm/H265) gifs.
- The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling
  As opposed to what widely supported animated image format?
- If I remember it correctly you can't rally beat a good dictionary encoding with wavelet compression for certain kinds of image such as drawings, cartoons and in general images with no or flat shading.
  (Might be a bit outdated on that believe as I don't really know what compression algorithms are used in JPEG-XL or WebP)
  Further, GIF is lossless compression, so that means your drawing compressed with it will be much smaller and after decompression you still have the same image exactly, pixel by pixel.
  That said, most drawings nowadays being digitally created with vector drawing apps means that an even better format is whatever native vector graphics format used by the app as that can scale to whatever size you want.
The guy clearly isn't familiar with a lot of image formats and is trying to find out about them by asking, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in a special community called no stupid questions, no less.
You don't need to call anyone a gullible fool and furthermore you've not actually helped to answer the question "what is webp", at all. What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression? If you wanted one less "gullible fool" you'd have to answer the question and educate, at best you've sown confusion.
- What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression?
  Some people in the tech community just seem to have this weird superiority complex for some reason. They think they're smarter than everyone else and look down on the normies, meaning they come off... Like this guy. It's like they put all of their skill points into INT and none of them into WIS.
- I feel like this answer is somewhat warranted because OP seems to have already made up their mind that it's bad. They referred to it as a "plague" and "filthy" despite not knowing what it even is. This comes across as a lack of interest in the actual answer and more just using this post as a platform to rant about it (despite knowing nothing about it).
  It's not unreasonable to ask everyone here to word their questions politely (or at least neutrally). This is somewhat aggressive, so I think an equally aggressive answer is perfectly suitable.
Why's man so vexed about file formats? Chill
- Because GIF is horrible for 90% of what it's used for these days.
- lol hates file format like it owes him money
- Everytime a post gets displayed on a screen, it got transferred over a dozen routers, parsed by a network card, decoded byte by byte to get each pixel's color and then displayed on screen
  Transferring and decoding all that extra data on millions of computers isn't free
  When you make an instagram post that gets seen by millions of people it's absolutely not negligible to use webp vs a jpg and choosing one over the other because you're just... used to the extension? is downright getting unacceptable if you are at least a lil tech savvy
  People need to start using newer file format for real now. It's been 20 years
this is nostupidquestions, not /g/. take your meds
You don't need to call them names lmao see the comm
Why are you so mad? Those are just file formats
- just?!?
Chill the hell out, maybe light one up if need be. Many people don't have the option of choosing thier own app.
- Neither have they the choice of what format others use. The point here was that the apps are to blame for not supporting the format, not the format for not being supported. It's a common format nowadays.

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.

The old shitty stuff was designed to compress images and stuff to be small enough to transfer on potato internet.
Now the HTML size itself ends up larger than many of the images while they code in endless advertising and scripts.
Old internet was better TBH.
- This isn’t really relevant when webp is more optimised and smaller file size. People are determined to force things to be GIFs despite them looking terrible and taking up 50MB for 10 seconds of 720p looping video.
- So was QuickTime and RealMedia. Today we know how to compress things better.
  Agree with the HTML sadly... Sigh.
GIF was ancient in the YTMND.com days. And nowadays, YTMND is like two decades old. Back when my life had hope.
Jpg is ancient
Sure, but so is .zip, and that's still useful.
IMO a better argument would be how and why webp improves on jpg (better compression, etc), not just "it's newer".
I shouldn't need to say this, but here goes: "old" and "shitty" aren't actually synonyms.
- It is more efficient. I thought it's obvious, that's why web sites use it, to save traffic and potentially storage. Hence my comparison to video formats. You don't see YouTube playing videos in Real Media format.
  It's also more universal, combining features of jpg, png and gif. Gif especially is a dreadful format for what it's commonly used. It was designed for tiny clipart animations, not HD video clips. Something like x265 can actually be hundreds of times more efficient.
Do you know if there are any formats that provide for native looping like gif? I find that feature useful for some standalone files.
- WebM can create loops
I mean for audio I use these large mostly black disk things...
For nonphysical media I'm a filthy streaming whore.
For music, we use some variant of mp4 or lossless
AAC is only 5 years younger than JPEG. Lossless music formats are about as ancient as GIF.
- But requirements for audio hasn't changed that much, and overall it's a much older and thus mature technology, that there isn't much left to figure out. Consumer CD format with 16bit 44.1kHz has been around for 40 years, and you don't need much better quality than that. So there isn't much left to figure out.
  But images and videos are different. 20 or 30 years ago you didn't need to commonly send 20 MPix HDR photos and HD to 4k videos over the internet. Shoehorning formats that were made for 640x480 pictures and tiny silly clipart animations just doesn't make sense, especially with all the development that's been made in that time. Newer compression techniques can help, but you can only do so much.
Jpg is ancient, and gif, holy shit gif is from stone age
Where does PNG stand in this timeline?
- I think PNG is a good format even today. It's lossless compressed, so there isn't that much you can squeeze out of that with new algorithms as you can out of lossy formats with new and smarter approaches.
  Sadly, PNG is being terribly misused on the internet too. What it's good for is simple drawn graphics, which it can compress to oblivion. So it's perfect for screenshots of say, your operating system's windows. I took a sshot as I'm typing this, and it came out as 190 kB. Not bad.
  But what it's so commonly used for, is people taking screenshots of photos such as from Instagram, and then reposting them. So instead of a tiny and shitty 50 kB IG picture, you get a 1.5MB PNG screenshots. Some then recompress it to a 1.5MB JPG for "maximum quality" when they realise they can't upload PNG to photo sites.
  I also very often encounter huge PNG photos with their extensions changed to JPG, and I don't know how or why that is happening.
- It supports features such as lossless editing and transparency but the compression is pretty bad.

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 is an example of a non crap webp:
- Is there a joke I'm missing here?
For anyone who doesn't know, you can easily change the file extension to .jpg and it'll still work.
- But also know that it's not a jpeg, and it only works because whatever app is opening the jpeg is able to read the webp format.

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.

Google is going to fuck it all up. So try the add-on when you can.
- Google is going to fuck it all up
  What do you mean?

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.

Or print screen and paste into an image editor
- I take a photo with my Polaroid.

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.

Adobe has no time for it, so it ads that annoying extra step when collecting assets. I would appreciate Adobe support for it natively in Pr / Ps / Ae / Me and I'm cool with it.
- Wow, doesn't surprise me that Adobe does not support it. They still don't support full screen or native dark mode on macOS in After Effects. Guess poor Adobe can't be bothered to update basic functionality.
- There's a plugin to add support in PS, it's worth getting if you use them often.
I'm pretty sure discord does not want to play nice with it whatsoever
- It doesn't do avif or jxl but it does handle webp
  It's chromium under the hood
I have an older version of Office (and more importantly, Access) at work which doesn't want to hear anything about .webp. When I need to make a document containing product pictures for a customer, .webp is a huge annoyance and time waste. Luckily the Firefox extension that bans .webp and forces .png or .jpg saves the day.
Transcoding and serving images as .webp as default is fine for saving BW and all that jazz, but when I click "Save image as" I should automagically end up on my disk with the original image format whatever that might be. But since that doesn't seem to be a thing, I'll happily find a way to force the server to serve the original all the time since for me BW is not a problem, but I don't want to waste time converting every image before I can actually use it.
- I often will use the Windows Snipping Tool to screenshot, then copy/paste the screenshot. This also works around sites trying to block you from right-clicking images. Granted you're limited to screen resolution then but web images are almost always so tiny anyways that makes little difference most of the time

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.

Lemmy also converts gifs to mp4. Or at least lemmy.world does.
is there a gif vs jif aspect to this format yet?
- The B is silent so it's pronounced "We Pee"

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.

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.

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.
- 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?

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?

Works great in Ubuntu.
My guess is Microsoft doesn't like it because Google came up with it. Ms has had some issues with recognizing open formats before. Could be you are using old versions of apps too.
- Oddly enough I had a hard time getting webp files to work as desktop backgrounds on Ubuntu even if it opened it fine in the viewer. Had to use a converter
Photoshop couldn't open it which is absolutely hilarious for an expensive app... while Paint.net can.
- Paint.net is one of the first apps I install on every new computer. It's just excellent for quick and dirty image manipulations.
.webp was developed Google so of course Microsoft hates it and tried to hinder it's adoption.
- They also don’t, by default, support HEVC and charge you to open them now… it used to be a free app on the Microsoft store.
  https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-video-extensions
- I can recommend qimgv for an image viewer.
Because Google bad, even when they make the rare good thing

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."

It’s a great format—they do make websites load noticeably faster (especially with a lot of images), however it’s extra work dealing with compatibility and it does make it harder for users as they aren’t compatible with some of software/operating systems yet
- I’ve never encountered a program that wasn’t compatible with WebP, what are you using?

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.

My image viewer of choice will never implement it, they replied when I suggested, because the spec isn't standardized. And because they consider themselves photography viewer/editor, not an image viewer. Understandable.
The webp is a format used exclusively for web graphics with no practical use in digital photography, moreover, the technical documentation is not really standardized so it makes it really challenging to ensure 100% support. Mainly for those reasons, the webp is not supported in ZPS X
Im using it because it got the best tag manager/tag browser, not for the photo features.
Reminds me of VideoRedo. Cool niche little program that lets you slice video files quickly and losslessly. Then the main developer died. The other developer has kept the license server up, but he doesn't own any of the copyrights. And the program was so niche it doesn't generate much revenue for the work that has to go into it.
Which image viewer?
- ImpressionEyes. I really like how you can view images without a window.

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.

To install GIMP, type: pacman -S gimp. If you don't know what is pacman, follow this guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
- How can I open many photos on gimp like to view group of photos?

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.

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.
- This plugin will fix the thumbnails in Finder
- Couldn't you use a file manager that sucks less?

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.

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

Well when I try to send one in Discord it prompts the other person to download the file instead of embedding it for them to look at
Oh yeah, and they don't even show up to send in Messenger, they just error there.
- Weird. WebP works for me in Discord just fine, both on desktop and mobile. It's all just Chromium under the hood after all (unless it's an iPhone, in which case it's probably Safari)
- That's discord being shite. Same thing happens with AV1 videos. But if you inspect element inside the client and change the source video or image, webp or AV1 can embed just fine.
  My assumption is that they're afraid they won't display on all platforms. But it could still try.
  I can't speak for Messenger though. I won't touch Facebook with a pole.
Microsoft Windows 10 photo viewer?

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.

I stick to png

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.

I'm sure some CMSes do that, but as a web dev I can assure you I absolutely do not

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

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

- 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
Just fullscreen them and screenshot with Greenshots lmao
Or use "save as" and replace the ".webp" extension with ".jpeg" in the file dialog.
- This only changes the user-friendly name, not the way the file is encoded.

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.

It's not better than png.
It's smaller than png, but png is lossless and webp is very much not.
- WebP can be lossless or lossy compression. However, it is not easily apparent which compression mode is used for a given WebP file.
  Google says lossy WebP is 25 percent smaller than JPEG and lossless WebP is 25 percent smaller than PNG.
- Lossless is not always immediately better. But webp can be lossless anyway.

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

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.

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.

Why isn't it better? I thought it does lossless compression much better, no?

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

Basically everything on Lemmy is webp, btw, so you've probably encountered it a lot more :D
- Huh! Well then I should say, the only place where I've seen it and other options was ....

Eh, is a file format opinionated now?!

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.

Actually, just changing the file name doesn't change the format. If it works, it's because whatever place you uploaded to already supported webp.
If you download a webp file and you really want jpg, you need to actually convert it, not just slap .jpg on the end.
- A pretty large amount of .JPG images are actually .WebP but people simply don’t notice for some strange reason. I’ve already seen several WebP images uploaded to WikiMedia with a JPG extension.
- Just relaying what worked for me. Tried uploading with .webp and it didn't work, tried with .jpg and it did. Didn't matter to me whether it was a real conversion or not.
- In that context: Websites may offer alternative image formats for the same image. They may offer jpg alongside webp. It's just not easily discoverable by end users.

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

Just renaming a file extension is not enough, that's only a user-friendly name. The file itself needs to be decoded differently. On Linux you can recode them with commands such as Imagick: magick input.webp output.jpg. Either way there are also many website that can recode/convert them for you.

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.

Old, outdated software? Windows 11 won't open it, nor will Photoshop, last I checked.
I'm fully aware of the format, but until it's compatible with everything seamlessly the way PNG or JPEG are, I'd rather stick with those for now.
What's especially annoying is web pages that store their images seemingly as JPEG but are actually serving them through a CDN that converts them to WEBP if the browser supports them, so you try to save a seemingly JPEG JPEG, only to find at the last second it's actually WEBP.
- Yes, because webp images are smaller while having similar quality than jpeg. On some images is greater reduction than on others.
  So websites and CDNs are using webp to speed up delivery and reduce download size.
  But yes, software support is not complete.
- FWIW I use Photoshop 2023 to convert webp images to other formats occasionally. My Mac has no issues viewing them but I think my windows 10 desktop has issues. Pretty much all browsers support it though.
- Just like GIFs, only web browsers open it, in Windows. That, and Irfanview.