use .webp format rather than .jpg for screenshots?

johnwhelan

Well-known member
I've been playing and from what I can see an image saved in .webp format uses less file space than the same image saved as a .jpg and there is very little visible difference.

Thoughts

Thanks John
 
I have been using .png format for some time now for the same reasons - better compression than .jpeg and it has an alpha channel.
 
I found a site giving a review of .webp compared to .jpeg. Interesting reading. It also compared .webp to .png and the comparison was not as good (the .webp files were significantly larger than their .png originals).

https://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/webp-website/

Since .webp is a Google format (now open sourced) it does have the backing of some industry heavy weights and many browsers (including FireFox) now support it.

I rarely use .jpeg any more so I don't know if it would be worth my while to make the switch.
 
I ran a test on saving the same image in both .webp and .png formats. The test went very well but I ran into a few problems when it came to uploading the images to this forum for a side by side comparison - it was going to be in this post.


  1. Windows File Explorer did not show the .webp image as a thumbnail - it used the default Chrome icon instead. No big deal as it is just a file and the format does not prevent it from being uploaded but it would be nice if you could see the .webp image as a thumbnail.
  2. My image hosting service, PostImage, accepted the .webp file upload but immediately converted it to a .png image for storage and (presumably) for posting. This defeated the whole purpose.
  3. Trainz Gallery would not accept a .webp format image. But .webp format has only been around for 10 years so it is probably way too soon :D

But I can say that using GIMP, the .webp image saved with the default settings was 131 kb while the .png image also saved with the default settings was 683 kb - which contradicted the review I mentioned in my previous post. I could see no visual differences between the two images.

The drawback or weakness, as my little experiment exposed, is lack of acceptance (so far).

Addendum: To answer John's original question in the first post, it seems that .webp images will not work in these forums.
 
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lbsc_wagons.webp


The above is a .webp image just to test to see if it can be posted in the forum.

Cheerio John
 
And as always... it's a good idea to use an Image Optimizer for images going to websites, forums, mail, etc. (For faster load times.) I have "ImageOptim" utility on my desktop. Just drop an image on it for proper compression for web use. Also available for Mac and Windows. On my Mac you can just drop files onto the icon and it does it's thing.
https://imageoptim.com/versions.html
 
Google? more monopolising the web attempts, No thank you.

Converting from jpg, a lossy format to webP another lossy format would produce a worse image than if left as jpg. Quality v size. Faster loading websites might be a benefit if you are on dialup or a very slow broadband, kind of pointless if on a fast connection. From the second link below this is to enable Google's search engine to rate sites with webP images higher up the list as allegedly will load faster.

Interesting details on it here https://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/webp-website/ Not enough to make me mess with it.
 
was the google response to my post? I didn't mention Google. I maintain a 1500 page website and fast load times is more important than quality of a thumbnail picture of a book in the bookstore. Large background images, banners, etc can be optimized for faster load times. Pics that need quality can be be left high quality. To each his own. It literally take 3 seconds to drop and drag on an icon. Don't have to "mess with it."
 
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Oh... I missed your point. Google implemented the format. Thanks for the reply. Understood now. I thought you were referring simply to "compression" in general.
 
Google? more monopolising the web attempts, No thank you.

Converting from jpg, a lossy format to webP another lossy format would produce a worse image than if left as jpg. Quality v size. Faster loading websites might be a benefit if you are on dialup or a very slow broadband, kind of pointless if on a fast connection. From the second link below this is to enable Google's search engine to rate sites with webP images higher up the list as allegedly will load faster.

Interesting details on it here https://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/webp-website/ Not enough to make me mess with it.

Why would you convert? Screenshot in Paintshop pro save as .webp fomat. Where does .jpg come into play? It might be nice if N3V allowed screenshots to be captured in .webp format rather than .jpg and might even save them some space on their servers.

Firefox, Edge, Google all display them quite happily. I note whilst there is no date on your web page one of the comments is dated 2016 so things have moved on since then. For example it is now fully open sourced. Paintshop pro certainly supports it I'm unable to comment on Photoshop.

I note that the article does more details including some comments about how effective it is. Yes high speed connections help but web site response times are of interest and bandwidth is of interest as well not only to end users but to hosting companies even if the rest of the world is watching films in 4k over the internet.

https://opensource.com/article/20/4/webp-image-compression

Cheerio John
 
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