Pretty much everything supports it now, and in case you haven't noticed pretty much all the images on Lemmy are webp because it lets instances save tons and tons on bandwidth and storage.
The next "better but not yet supported" image format is .avif.
I actually decided to use avif on my project. But both this and webp is as fast as I know, not supported in any default image viewer on windows. Which is rater annoying, but I moved on to better programs for tgat anyways.
Avif is second to jxl though, some of the downsides of being a video format is that you loose progressive loading (only top to bottom iirc), degrades on re-encodes, and some other things I can't think of. Avif gets a win because if you have a av1 decoder you already have a avif decoder too! But since it is a video frame essential there are some downsides since some image specific features can't or won't be added.
Not the end of the world, but out of the few apps that don't fit in the 'pretty much everything' group, messenger is one of them and I can't share a good bunch of memes on Lemmy with my friends because of that. I usually end up screenshotting my own screen because of that.
Linux and Android handles .webp just fine tho, in windows try open source image viewer like imageglass and everything gonna work just fine, speaking from experience i had, just as most people here i hated that webp doesn't open until i understood that open source image viewers handle it just fine, then i liked that file format cause it's versatile i mean, it can be picture or animation like gif, and compression feels better
I hate it as much as anyone else at the moment, and maybe I'm just an optimist, but once more support starts rolling out I think it's going to be great.
On Android, use Share image from Firefox or similar, then click the edit icon before sharing (on the share sheet that pops up), then just immediately share without modifications. It'll share it as a new PNG I'm pretty sure. Dang Facebook Messenger that won't accept WebP and I have to do this so many times.
Sorry, is this comment meant in jest? If not, could you explain what exactly you mean by "no need for a converter?"
I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. No actual file data conversion is happening when you do that unless you're using additional tools e.g. browser extensions.
Hey, thanks for the input. I'd like to read more about this, but I can't seem to find anything related online. Anything else you could share?
Just checking, you sure you're not confusing fallback-to-PNG when the browser doesn't support webp? Because that's a bit of separate issue, and not a terribly relevant one since all major browsers have supported webp for a while now.
I think I know what you're talking about, and I think you might have misunderstood a few things. I'll explain my point and I'd appreciate it if you could confirm later whether it helped, or if I'm the one who misunderstood you.
"Saving as..." is, usually, just for setting the name of the file. The full filename, extension included. The extension is just another part of the name. It doesn't define what rules the file's contents actually follow. They're for other purposes, such as helping your operating system know which software to use when opening each file. For example:
User double clicks a .pdf
System: Oh, I should try opening this in Adobe Acrobat.
But that doesn't mean the file is actually a PDF. You can change the extension of any file, and it won't automatically be converted to that extension (unless a specific feature has been added to make that implicit conversion). You could give a binary a .pdf extension and your system might then try opening it in Acrobat. Of course, it won't work—there's no way the system could have automatically made that conversion for you.
So you might wonder, why does your (fake) PNG (which is really just a webp with an incorrect extension) still work just fine? You can open it, view it, send it. What's the trick?
Thing is, the software that actually deals with those files doesn't even need to care about the extension, it's a lot smarter than that. These programs will use things like magic bytes to figure out what the file they're handling really is and deal with it appropriately.
So in this scenario, the user could save a webp file as PNG.
funny cat.png (still a webp!)
Then they might double click to open it.
System: How do I open a .png again?
.webp -> try the image viewer
.jpeg -> try the image viewer
.png -> try the image viewer (there it is)
And finally, the image viewer would correctly identify it as a webp image and display it normally.
The user might then assume that, since everything works as expected, they properly converted their webp to a PNG. In reality, it's all thanks to these programs, built upon decades of helping users just make things work. Same with Discord, Paint.NET, etc. Any decent software will handle files it's meant to handle, even if they aren't properly labeled.
If you were to check the file contents though, using a tool like file, czkawka to find incorrect extensions, or even just checking image properties, it should still be identified as a webp.
I didn't try it myself as you said because, to my understanding of files and software, doing so made no sense. But again, do tell if I got something wrong or misinterpreted your comment.
Are you sure? Maybe your image viewer adapts to the magic number and recognizes the webp file as webp anyway. I believe the formats are fundamentally different.
Note: this DOES NOT convert the file (obviously) although it will force it to be 'usable' in certain cases. If you bring the same file to a program that cannot work with webp format (ex. Da Vinci Resolve), it will crash or not show. To non-creators this is not an issue, but for creators: have fun figuring out which images you've saved are actually webp and won't work later on.
I know webp has become much less annoying after windows finally added webp support to photos after w11, so 'advice' like this tends to work more often than not. Just use a browser extension and convert it properly if you intend to spread an image...
Semi-related, I'm still salty about Google's rejection of JPEG XL. I can't help but remember this when webp discussion crops up, since Google were the ones who created it.
Don't know, many possible reasons. In fairness, even Mozilla hasn't decided to fully invest in it, and libjxl hasn't defined a stable public API yet.
That said, I don't believe that's the kind of issue that'd stop Google if they wanted to push something forward. They'd find a way, funding, helping development, something.
And unfortunately for all of us, Google Chrome sort of... Immensely influences what the web is and will be. They can't excuse themselves saying "they'll work on it, if it gains traction" when them supporting anything is fundamental to it gaining traction in the first place.
You'd have to believe Google is acting in good faith for the sake of the internet and its users. I don't think I need to explain why that's far from guaranteed and in many issues incredibly unlikely.
Useless mini-rant
I really need a single page with all this information I can link every time image standards in the web are mentioned. There's stuff I'm leaving out because writing these comments takes some work, especially on a phone, and I'm kinda tired of doing it.
I still hold hope for JPEG XL and that Google will cave at some point.
Ah no worries. I found it a little bit difficult to believe that the decision wouldn't be questioned by the company if it didn't align with its overall goals. That would be weird.
Not sure what you mean by "Google killed it". JPEG XL proposal was only submitted in 2018 and it got standardized in 2022. It has a lot of features which are not available in browsers yet, like HDR support (support for HDR photos in Chrome on Android was only added 8 months ago, Firefox doesn't support HDR in any shape at all), no browsers support 32 bits per component, there's no support for thermal data or volume data, etc. You can't just plug libjxl and call it a day, you have to rework your rendering pipeline to add all these features.
I'd argue that Google is actually working pretty hard on their pipeline to add missing features. Can't say the same about Mozilla, who can't even implement HDR for videos for over a decade now.
Yeah, why keep a feature which doesn't work? Once they add missing stuff to the renderer, they'll add XL support back. But I guess that will take a few years.
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