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

  • Kabe@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    233
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      151
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          14
          arrow-down
          52
          ·
          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
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              41
              ·
              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
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                13
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                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
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  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
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

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

              • Gerula@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

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

                • minorninth@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            12
            ·
            edit-2
            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.ee
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          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
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    130
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        56
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          27
          ·
          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.

        • bouh@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          12
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            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.

            • bouh@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              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.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                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

            • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              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.

    • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      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)

  • DrQuint@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    173
    arrow-down
    95
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

      • ram@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        17
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling

        As opposed to what widely supported animated image format?

        • twistedtxb@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          21
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          APNG, WebP, AVIF, WebM. Not sure about JpegXL

          GIF is size and ressource heavy

          • ram@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            23
            arrow-down
            6
            ·
            1 year ago

            Of all the formats you mentioned these are supported on popular platforms:

            • Twitter: gif
            • Discord: gif
            • Mastodon: gif
            • Reddit: gif, apng
            • Tumblr: gif, webp
            • Lemmy: gif, apng, webp

            That’s why gifs are still a thing.

            • blujan@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              14
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              This is circular reasoning. They are wondering why gif is still a thing precisely because it’s so supported while other formats that are better aren’t and you are answering that it is because it’s supported while other formats aren’t.

              • ram@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                8
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                In that case the only people that can answer the question are the engineers from those platforms.

              • Beliriel@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Because it’s old and easy to handle. Yes it’s wasteful if you convert whole videos, but really anything under 10s with low rez is easily handleable by pretty much anything. Gif was the first animated format and that’s why it’s big. Also early internet forum days were absolutely plastered with pixelart gifs that ran for minutes and barely swalloed 100kb. You can get a lot of bang for your buck if you save on pixels and framerate. But ofc a 60fps render of some 4k bluray clip will eat your memory. Contrast that with 16×32 px gif that runs at 8fps.

                • Aceticon@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  3
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  GIF is big because it uses dictionary compression (pixel colors are mapped to a lookup table and then combinations of bits of increasing length are assigned to each table entry, the shortest combinations going for the most used colors, the longuest for the least used ones) which is great for stuff with clear (not-aliased) lines, a limited number of colors and large areas with just one flat color (such as drawings) but really bad for actual pictures (anything real world or imitating it, with natural shading).

                  I believe GIF still beats all or most other formats (except, for larger images, the actual vector graphics formats used in the programs with which such drawings are made nowadays) for things like drawings. (That said, I think PNG has a mode that does the same kind of compression, used for stuff like the little lemmy icon next to our nicknames here)

                  Animation on top if it was a bit of a hack due to the header format allowing multiple images in the same file, so it’s really just a slideshow that has no video-oriented compression (i.e. each image is compressed individually and stored whole even if it’s pretty much the last image with but a handful of pixels changed), hence why it’s big when used for animation.

                  The kind of compression used in stuff like JPEG is based on the frequency of how each color channel changes across a block of pixels - which was 8x8 in the original JPEG - (i.e. it tries to match each block in the image to a sum of waves of different frequencies) which is much better for natural images, but loses information as a perfect match is usually impossible, and video compression methods have all sorts of intermediate frame compression techniques, the most basic of which is “this frame is the last frame with block such and such intact or moved around X pixels plus here’s a bunch of entirelly new pixels” which usually is a lot better than compressing each image individually and storing it, not taking in account previous or subsequent images.

                  PS: I learned this stuff back at Uni, almost 3 decades ago, which shows you just how old this stuff is.

              • bouh@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                3
                arrow-down
                4
                ·
                1 year ago

                It’s called an industry standard. We’re using the same bolting in mechanic for ages. Only in computer science do things have to change every year…

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      56
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Ghostc1212@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • Pyro@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Ok so I’m going to be making a lot of assumptions here but I think that OP’s language was hyperbolic and over the top because it was tongue in cheek and trying express frustration with what to them is an inexplicable roadblock to their normal web use, whilst also genuinely trying to figure out why such an obstacle would be put in place. Until they get the necessary information they’ll never see it as anything else. Looking at it that way the kind of nerd rage response devoid of the necessary context or pertinent information for the person it’s directed seemed as inappropriatenas it was counterproductive.

          That said, those are just assumptions I made based on the tenor of OP’s speech and I guess you could argue I didn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to his respondent. I don’t think that matters much though, it’s still utterly pointless bloviating at someone who just clearly doesn’t understand.

      • ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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

        • ...m...@ttrpg.network
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          …PNGs took about twenty-five years to achieve ubiquitous support across consumer software…

    • ZombieZookeeper@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Chill the hell out, maybe light one up if need be. Many people don’t have the option of choosing thier own app.

      • KoboldOfArtifice@ttrpg.network
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    70
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • over_clox@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      24
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          Oh, I forgot to mention in my other comment, as far as compression goes, what ever happened to good old MIDI? 🤔

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            Midi is quite literally a text format, and you can open it in anything. It’s just a matter of interpretation what comes out of it.

            • over_clox@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              I’m looking at a MIDI file in a hex editor right now, it’s literally not a plain text file. Plain text files use carriage return and/or line feed characters to end a line of text. MIDI uses null to separate instrument notes and attributes.

              Also, when was the last time you tried opening a MIDI file? Seems like half the media player apps and even some operating systems don’t even natively support it anymore.

              • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

                Ok apologies. But you get my point, it’s a set of instructions made for actual hardware with built-in samples. I don’t think there’s any such thing in modern computers even beyond emulation on OS level.

                Sound players are made to play sound, not instructions, and most people don’t need to play MIDIs. Even so, the actual playback experience then depends on the OS/hardware/whatever, which again is not something you expect from a sound player.

                You can always use specific software to play MIDIs, which are better equipped for it with stuff like MIDI font support, instrument selection and other stuff.

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I never said GIF was all that great. Hell, beyond the fact that it was piss poor compression, it didn’t even have audio. 🤦‍♂️

          Now MPEG1/2, MP3 and JPEG weren’t all that bad, considering the era of technology they came from.

          I can definitely agree that modern compression has improved beyond that even, but at the same time now everything is automatically tagging in all sorts of extra data like, I dunno, the GPS location the image/video was taken. Like hey, let’s just broadcast everyone’s address to the rest of the world…

            • over_clox@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Of course, yes, you can. But back then, that was usually up to the person recording the media to manually add metadata later in processing.

              These days everything is getting tagged automatically as you’re recording stuff.

              Bye bye privacy.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        So was QuickTime and RealMedia. Today we know how to compress things better.

        Agree with the HTML sadly… Sigh.

    • elephantium@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • venusenvy47@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Do you know if there are any formats that provide for native looping like gif? I find that feature useful for some standalone files.

            • DrQuint@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              No, lol.

              It stands for animated png btw. It was an extension. The benefit was that it always rendered something everywhere, if it didn’t support the animation, because it would be read out as a regular (but suspiciously heavy) png in that case.

              I brought it up because it’s yet another old-ass .gif solution that didn’t stick because people love the term “gif”.

    • toasteecup@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      I mean for audio I use these large mostly black disk things…

      For nonphysical media I’m a filthy streaming whore.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • elephantium@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          people taking screenshots of photos such as from Instagram

          This one really grinds my gears. Why do so many people insist on sharing text by taking a picture instead of pasting the text? Or better yet, just linking to the original? It’s such a waste of bandwidth :(

        • Jamie@jamie.moe
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          Probably people uploading to sites that limit extensions thinking they’re clever by just changing the extension, or being straight up wrong in thinking the extension changing actually changes the file type.

          The sites might not bother to check the metadata, and anything worth any salt that displays the image will ignore the extension anyway.

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            That sounds logical, but on most operating systems these days the extension is hidden, and/or you need to go through some hoops to change it. So I would think that most people who think that wouldn’t even know how to change it.

            But more importantly, where do those PNGs come from in the first place? Sure, some are clearly screenshots such as of IG or TT, but there are tons of large PNG images that are clearly photos from cameras that someone just took and resaved as png (and later, or someone else, then renamed to jpg).

            I could understand that happening occasionally for a bunch of reasons, but I’ve encountered this so many times, it’s pretty bizarre.

            Btw it’s something you might not even notice if you aren’t using e.g. an image viewer that uses a different icon or background based on actual image type.

            • Jamie@jamie.moe
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              I suppose another solution might be that it falls under those lines, but some misbehaving services where they’re uploaded are giving out improper filenames and not confirming the type.

              Though I can’t imagine many of those being incredibly popular, or, it’s just that images are recycled for so long that eventually many of them hit such a site in their lifetimes.

                • Jamie@jamie.moe
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Yet you still posted it in jpeg. Can’t fool me with your sly tricks.

                  Input #0, image2, from '85974f2f-5463-40ba-93ea-45417c183fcc.jpeg':
                    Duration: 00:00:00.04, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 54211 kb/s
                    Stream #0:0: Video: mjpeg (Baseline), yuvj444p(pc, bt470bg/unknown/unknown), 1513x947, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 25 tbn
                  
              • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

                After reading through more comments in this discussion, maybe I have my answer, at least partially. A lot of people here suggest to use extensions and other ways to convert webp from the web to… PNG.

                And then that PNG gets shared further…

                Oh gawd if that’s why so many pngs are on the net… What a way to take a good idea and completely fuck it up. Now instead of a 2MB jpeg or 0.5MB webp we deal with 10MB pngs 🤦‍♂️

      • qaz@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        It supports features such as lossless editing and transparency but the compression is pretty bad.

        • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s lossless, it’s meant for 2D and drawn graphics. Can’t do that much with lossless compression.

          • nulldev@lemmy.vepta.org
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            It’s still bad compared to modern lossless algorithms. PNG is very old and even though PNG encoders have evolved, it is still fundamentally a decade behind modern lossless compression algorithms.

            For example: JPEG XL in lossless mode compresses at least 30% better than PNG.

            Also, PNG is not actually lossless in many cases. PNG only supports RGB colorspaces. If you try to store anything that’s not in an RGB colorspace (e.g. a frame of a video) in a PNG, you will lose some color information as colorspace conversion is not lossless. Example of someone running into this issue: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35399677

            JPEG XL supports non-RGB colorspaces so you don’t have this problem.

            • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Okay but that difference is not as critical as with jpg, which are also more abundant. The bigger problem with png is that people use it for things it’s not meant or designed for - frame of a video being case in point.

              If anything, it just proves how lacking we are in other image formats, when we keep shoehorning clipart formats like png and gif into other duties. Well not lacking as in not having them, but not using them.

              • nulldev@lemmy.vepta.org
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                There’s no real reason why you shouldn’t use PNG for a frame of video. I’m not talking about using it as a video format, I’m talking about extracting a frame from a video and sending it off to an editor for inclusion in another video or image.

                As a user, I would expect that I could use the most popular lossless image format if I want to losslessly share a frame from a movie with someone.

                Of course I do agree that we need adoption of other image formats. We really should not still be cramming everything in PNGs or JPGs in 2023.

                • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  There is, exactly because png is made for strict rgb colorspace. Especially today when videos can be in HDR and with all kinds of color correction shenanigans, so which you won’t get back once you try to put the PNG back into the video.

                  But I’m not a video editor, so I don’t know what still format is best suited for this. I imagine real editors can deal with it, and for regular people who just make screenshots for memes, it’s good enough. As I said, png is still a good enough format, but let’s not use it for stuff like converting webp photos for further sharing.

        • Shurimal@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          PNG compresses like nothing else when it comes to graphs, text, UI elements, digital drawings, comics, screenshots from apps etc. And doesn’t suffer from “mosquito” artifacts and other .jpg nonsense. It was never meant to be used for photographs and other statistically “noisy” images for which .jpg works much better.

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Isn’t it funny how the internet is full of Instagram screenshots in PNG, and Twitter screenshots in JPG?

            It feels like some extra-dimensional aliens are fucking with us and making everything backwards.

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • elephantium@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Shoehorning formats that were made for 640x480 pictures

          Err…nothing in the file format spec restricts jpg to a particular size. I would actually argue that this undermines your point – bandwidth was incredibly limited in the 90s compared to what I see today.

          Simple example: a 640x480 image is (at least) 307,200 bytes = 0.3M, so it takes at least 5.4 seconds to transmit over a 56k modem. A 4k image, same color depth, is 16000000 bytes = 15M. On a gigabit connection (what I have), that takes about 0.02 seconds.

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            I was taking more about quality than size in this particular comparison. In 1993 you were happy to squeeze through an image in any quality almost.

            It goes hand in hand tho.

            If you can compress a 50 MPix, 16-bit, high dynamic range image from a modern high-end DSLR to a reasonable size with a better algorithm and format, you’d also have an easier time squeezing a crappy 640x480 pic to an even smaller size. We just couldn’t do either so well 30 years ago.

            • elephantium@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              Heh, in 1993 I wasn’t online at all. '97 or '98 is more like it in my case.

              That’s a fair point, too, better image quality for a given size. I was more focused on raw bandwidth demands.

  • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    66
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    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.

  • Gamey@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    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.

  • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    43
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    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.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    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

  • Pechente@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • PotjiePig@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Pechente@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Shurimal@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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

  • Julian@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • regbin_@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • tvmole@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    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?

  • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    32
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            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.

  • wilberfan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.”

    • shootwhatsmyname@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

      • qaz@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve never encountered a program that wasn’t compatible with WebP, what are you using?

        • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I have since tailored my app choice for webp so unsure nowadays, but my experience was that Windows photos could not open them, Photoshop requires a plugin, websites don’t allow uploading them, the list went on. I love webp but the application support has been (or was) abysmal for years.