Your opinion on the .webp format

[SignalWalker]

Within the web revival, most people don't actually like companies like Google, so why would they care if Google can save money by using webp?

Yeah, but they're also useful to people and not just corporations. IIRC, most people actess the internet through low-bandwidth connections (ex. mobile data), where image size can noticeably change load times. It also uses more electricity to process larger images, which can be important for things like solar-powered web servers.

Also, like, if you're saving stuff to your phone: storage is expensive! I've only got like 128 GB on my phone and those memes add up.

Or: imagine you're hosting a matrix server for your friends, and your VPS only gives you 80GB of storage (ex. Hetzner's $7/month tier) -- you gotta compress uploaded images somehow, or you're gonna run out of space.

[Melooon]

Yeah, but they're also useful to people and not just corporations

Of course, you gotta compress - but that's not really root of most peoples dislike of webp (Im im understanding the posts here correctly) - you can compress very effectively in many other formats; there are a few situations where webp can compress a little more than others, but at indie-scale that difference is usually negligible.

The issue with webp is that its created with compression for large company servers as its priority; its priority is not people. Thats why support for it on desktop image viewers and editors has been so slow and messy - we are not who these images are made for - and thats something thats worth being bothered by

[div]

In general, if you're trying not to be mean,

I don't want to be mean, but I'm somewhat exhausted with people making up paranoid nonsense. There are plenty of real privacy violations for Google to be accountable for. These kinds of takes and not calling them out for being incorrect makes all of us privacy advocates look stupid.

[div]

Most likely you understand my point, and we don't necessarily need to argue about it more if you don't want to.

To transition into something more positive... I wrote a PowerShell script that people can use to convert images.

I chose PowerShell because I'm assuming that most of you are using Windows and while I would prefer python myself, installing python and the needed dependencies is maybe a bit hard for some.

Basically save this to a file and name it "script.ps1"

Code

param (
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true, Position=0)]
    [ValidateScript({Test-Path $_ -PathType 'Container'})]
    [string]$InputDirectory,

    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true, Position=1)]
    [string]$OutputDirectory
)

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $OutputDirectory | Out-Null
$webpFiles = Get-ChildItem -Path $InputDirectory -Filter "*.webp" -File
foreach ($webpFile in $webpFiles) {
    $outputPath = Join-Path -Path $OutputDirectory -ChildPath ($webpFile.BaseName + ".png")
    $webpImage = [System.Drawing.Image]::FromFile($webpFile.FullName)
    $webpImage.Save($outputPath, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Png)

    Write-Host "Converted $($webpFile.Name) to PNG."
}

Write-Host "Conversion completed."

Then the way you use this is like this, from command line

Code

.\script.ps1 -InputDirectory "C:\path\to\input\directory" -OutputDirectory "c:\path\to\output\directory"

If anyone needs help with using this, I would be happy to help you and you will never have to deal with webp again :P

It's also true that this could probably be improved in a lot of ways, but I figured this is a good starting point for someone who wants to solve problems like this with scripts.

[Memory]

I haven't had a big opinion on it until recently when I wanted to download an animated GIF and only got a static .webp... >:( I had to copy the link and paste it in order to share an animation!

[Grimlock]

webp's would be fine if support for them was actually implemented well instead of just putting them out there and making people deal with it, they cause you inconvenience unless you get extensions to auto convert them or just convert them manually every time. luckily its getting better nowadays but you still run into it sometimes

[starbreaker]

I've been using WebP on my website because it appears to be supported in recent versions of all browsers except IE11 and I've gotten email from people saying that they visit my site using mobile phones on data plans that throttle after less than 2GB of transfer per month. I'd rather use AVIF or JPEG XL instead, but Edge doesn't support AVIF even though it's based on Chromium and no public-release browser supports JPEG XL.

I use ImageMagick to generate WebP from JPEG and PNG files; I find that it's easy to batch-process the images in a Makefile. But if you're on Windows you could also write a PowerShell script to run ImageMagick on a set of files.