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 can't speak for all distros and DEs, and I also don't do many image related things, but I'm using Linux Mint Cinnamon and the default desktop background manager doesn't support .webp. Sometimes I see a cool image that I want to use and I have to convert it; other times, when I notice it's .webp, I just give up on that image.
Cinnamon hasn't been keeping up for years. When I tried Mint again when I went full-time linux last year, and found the same unfixed bugs from three years prior, I ditched it forever.
The format has been around for 13 years, and is objectively superior to its predecessors. By now it is actually set to be replaced by avif and jpgxl which are even better.
At this point running into cases where it doesn't work makes me question the software, not the format.
No offense but Mint is not a great example. They are behind in general. Still figuring out Wayland, fractional scaling and VRR, things which KDE has supported in stable releases for some time now. KDE even is getting HDR along with Cosmic and SteamOS, something Mint isn't even close to. Mint kernels are older than Ubuntu's, which are hardly new. I used to love Mint, but they are falling further and further behind KDE, Gnome, and System76 (PopOS and Cosmic). To me it seems the new distros for newbies are Fedora, Debian, and a few derivatives like Nobara, UBlue, and PopOS.
I don't understand what people's problem with this format is except in the case of animated .gifs. I can view it. I can reupload it. It's still an image and it still works. The exception is animations. Animations always end up as a still image when saved in that format.
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-another-format 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 an executable 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...
