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WebP is such a goated format
- merry_flame 4y agoOne thing I haven't seen stated here yet is that WebP is apparently a low resilience format: lose a few bytes and your image is dead. Still, it's extremely light and is much better than JPG for photos and PNG for simpler visuals. You can easily shave off an extra 50% file size off a standard optimized PNG image without any incurring any significant loss of quality, and even more if you're ready to accept higher losses. For Linux Mint users out there, the OS doesn't ship with an image viewer for the WebP format. qView is a really nice open source option Mint users may want to look into. You can also find Nemo file manager right-click actions on Github (Linux Mint Nemo WebP Converter Actions).
- everfree 4y agoReal shocker that lossy compression produces smaller files than lossless compression.
- LeoNatan25 4y agoCompression is the real “gOaT”.
- themerone 4y agoAuthor is so excited that their lossy webp images are so much smaller than lossless pngs.
- dvhh 4y agoThere seems to be a lossless specification of webp (that wasn't used in the article)
- lifthrasiir 4y agoFor what it's worth, the lossless WebP is an entirely different format from the original lossy WebP, only sharing the same file extension.
- Semaphor 4y agoWait, so support for WebP doesn’t imply format for both versions? If they don’t, that’s horrible. If they do, they are not entirely different at all.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIt's the first one, though it's hopefully hard to find actual software that has that problem unless you're intentionally seeking out versions from around 2012.
- jsonxr 4y agoI can create smaller jpg versions of these photos where I can't tell a difference.
- masklinn 4y agoNot just images but specifically photographs for web distribution. if that's not as far away from intended PNG use cases as can be, it’s getting there.
- jug 4y agoI thought you had gravely misunderstood the article because the author leads with discovering the lossless compression support of WebP and even compares it to advanced lossless compression tools like PNGOUT so I thought he wasn't comparing apples and oranges. But no. He DOES in fact compare lossy to lossless in the end, arguing the difference is hardly perceptible anyway. Which it is! I could see the loss of chroma when opening them on my desktop here. I don't understand. JPEG also compresses a photo better than PNG? What's the point? This is just confusing. Sure, for personal use, do whatever you like, but in a comparison... It would be interesting to see WebP Lossless vs PNGOUT. And/or WebP vs Mozjpeg. :)
- RedBeetDeadpool 4y agoIt helps them store more anime pictures at higher quality for less space. Pretty sure that's all they care about.
- phailhaus 4y agoYes: > However, the big point here is that without doing any of that, WebP seems to keep the quality I prefer while also reducing the size (doesn’t matter to me whether it’s lossy or lossless).
- ARandomerDude 4y agoContextually, it seems like "goated" means "excellent," which is somewhat bizarre (or "counterintuitive" as they say these days).
- jatone 4y agogoat -> greatest of all time. doesn't seem counterintuitive. its jargon most often seen in sport literature.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoOne of the car rental companies has started using it in their commercials. I do wonder how much of a generational divide there is on using it.
- techdragon 4y agoThe issue for me is it looks like an accidental autocorrect of the word “goatse” which internet users from an earlier pre-Facebook era may find more familiar than the verbifying of what was an acronym that is starting to be used as the original word but in a new adjective way.
- 42jd 4y agoIt’s a really commonly used among gen z. It’s used to mean it’s really good/one of the best. Eg these tacos are goated.
- saghm 4y agoI've definitely heard of "goat" as a noun meaning that, but "webp is such a goated format" sounds more to me like the writer thinks people try to laud it as the goat when it actually isn't. I guess it's because it sounds like the passive voice; "is goated" makes it sound like someone else is doing the goat-ing, at which point for something subjective and desired like "goat", "goating" sounds like it's being used as a more modern slang for "astroturfing" or something.
- 4y ago
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoPNG really wasn't intended to the be a format for photographs. It can't even store EXIF data. As a lossless format, it can work for photographs but as the article is surprised to find out, it doesn't do a good job of compressing them.
- wyldfire 4y agoI'm not impressed at this particular demonstration for just that reason. Does WebP provide a savings against jpeg for these photos? The important question: how does a WebP encoded screenshot look? if there's a huge field of a single color and some text written on the field, are there visible artifacts all around the text? This is a use case for PNG, and one where people can plainly see why a lossless format exists.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago> This is a use case for PNG, and one where people can plainly see why a lossless format exists. WebP has a lossless mode for that reason, and is almost a strict improvement over PNG [1]. [1] https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/webp-flif-comparison.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/webp-flif-comparison.html
- djbusby 4y agoWow! Violin graphs are neat!
- astrange 4y agoIt's not really a "mode", it's a completely different codec that appears to have been invented by a single random guy at Google and they just released it one day. Much like the rest of WebP.
- lifthrasiir 4y agoI'm aware of that, search for my other reply to this thread. Also that single random guy [1] is one of the co-authors of Brotli, WOFF2 and many image compression algorithms including JPEG XL. [1] https://twitter.com/jyzg https://twitter.com/jyzg
- thekid314 4y agoI want WebP to work, but when I use it on my website the colors are different than the original JPEG files. This is a problem because I'm a photographer and those subtle differences can make a photo feel flat and dead. When the color management is better I'll return.
- kingcharles 4y agoI'm guessing either the JPG or the WebP didn't have the right color profile embedded, or one of them is missing the color profile. This stuff is still a nightmare right now. Colors are something everyone in the technology stack needs to work on getting right.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- timClicks 4y agoYou can see this in the blog post. The .webp photos are highly saturated, giving them almost a comic book feel.
- onurtag 4y agoMy problem with webp is that lossy mode only supports 4:2:0 chroma subsampling which can make bright colors look worse in some situations. The sharp_yuv parameter helps but it can also introduce visible changes that did not exist beforehand.
- snvzz 4y agoWebP never got much traction, and makes zero sense to push for it now, as the dramatically better AVIF already exists.
- pippy 4y agoWebp is something you can push into production today: https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF%2CWEBP https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF%2CWEBP however AVIF only has about 65% market penetration. If you ran a serious webserver, it would make more sense to do automatic on the fly conversion using mod_pagespeed. This way it handles browser support for you.
- kingcharles 4y agoA decent proportion of the .JPGs and .GIFs being rendered on sites I visit are actually now .WEBP files with the headers set. So I'm seeing lots of people already making this translation invisibly. You only notice when you try to save the images.
- exmadscientist 4y agoOr when you notice quality loss because the original JPEG has significantly higher quality than whatever it got transcoded to. Seriously, people, stop transcoding to "newer, better" formats at lower quality. Just stop. I should never have a better experience if I set up an older browser that doesn't accept your newfangled stuff. Either manage to get the quality right (easier said than done) or just don't transcode stuff. (This is much easier to get right if you are also shrinking an image.)
- LinAGKar 4y agoIt seems to be pervasive for people to grossly overestimate the savings they can get, looking e.g. at how MPEG-4 TV channels are generally lower quality than MPEG-2 channels. And the biggest HEVC torrents are at most less than half the size of the AVC torrents, usually only like a quarter the size.
- orev 4y agoDespite the snark here, I think it’s good that someone’s excited about discovering something and wrote about it. I haven’t looked at webp in a while, so maybe I’ll try again.
- oldstrangers 4y agoI tried webp for my photo blog (https://roambyland.com/ https://roambyland.com/) but the quality was noticeably worse and I've never gone back. Its not there yet unfortunately.
- toddmorey 4y agoThat's a really nice site and great photography
- oldstrangers 4y agoThank you!
- thecsw 4y agoThat's such a cool website! Definitely, if someone focuses on photography, I am not fully into the field to know the best practices, simply trying out new and small things that I find around.
- ur-whale 4y agoMmmh. First, not entirely sure what "goated" means, but whatever floats your boat. Next, comparing a lossless format like PNG against a lossy format like webp ... what's the point unless all of his webp files are losslessly compressed. Last, if one wants to dive down the lossy image format rabbit hole, then webp is definitely very old news, jpeg XL [1][2] is - for example - much more cutting edge. Not much value in this article. [1] https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ [2] https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl
- NavinF 4y agohttps://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/goated https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/goated WebP matters because it’s supported by every browser and by every image editor worth using. We still don’t know if JPEG XL will survive or die like XR did. After all, it’s competitor AVIF already works everywhere except Safari.
- thecsw 4y agothank you! Yeah, I looked at those as well, but as a safari user, AVIF was just a no go and JPEG XL, looking cool though, is not adequately supported by anything (maybe just yet?)
- dchest 4y agoNot in this case, but comparing lossless PNG with lossy WebP makes sense because PNG is the only other format on the web that supports alpha channel. There’s no lossy format for that other than WebP.
- Donckele 4y agoOT but I just hate that firefox converts images to webp by default. The downloaded file is NOT whats at that URL. Having another format to deal with and not well supported is super annoying. I tried once to disable this in the “advanced settings” but it broke something and had to revert. Please have a simple checkbox in the standard settings page and have it disabled by default!
- bscphil 4y ago> firefox converts images to webp by default No it doesn't. What are you referring to?
- exmadscientist 4y agoIt doesn't convert them, but when it makes an additional request to download the file, the server might (depending on MIME hell, etc.) send back a different format. This is real and annoying.
- unicornporn 4y agoIt does not convert. But if you don't want WebPs, use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-w...
- Moru 4y agoThankyou, friends have been complaining about this for a while so now I can help them :-)
- RolloTom 4y agoIn case you don't want to install an extension, search in about:config for "image.webp.enabled" and set it to false. Worth mentioning, there's also a "image.avif.enabled" entry.
- unicornporn 4y ago
- getcrunk 4y agoOkay this is great but have y'all heard about avif? It's even better! Mainly just apple doesn't support it.
- modeless 4y agoI'd rather have JPEG XL personally. The other one that's really cool is Basis Universal, which is unique among compressed image formats in that it decodes directly to a GPU compressed texture in VRAM, resulting in way less memory usage and bandwidth consumption when the image is displayed. That's right, it remains compressed even as you view it!
- jjcm 4y agoThe reason why I'm mainly excited about .avif is that it'll run on the same hardware that decodes .av1 files. Means encoders will very easily be hardware accelerated - great for services or bulk encoding projects.
- astrange 4y agoHardware decoders tend to have strict limits on things like picture size, which video complies with and random still images often don't. So compatibility is not guaranteed. Neither is quality of course. Video encoders aren't always tuned for still images and it's even harder to tune a hardware encoder.
- johnny_reilly 4y agoAt Christmas I ran an experiment to convert all my blog images to webp. It worked well and my savings were around 50%. I haven't made the leap to make the move for the simple reason that webp isn't considered a "native" format in the main. I lose things like image previews when I'm navigating around my file system. That kind of thing. I think I'm also made slightly nervous by seeing so few others seeming to use it. Still might make the leap but haven't yet https://github.com/johnnyreilly/blog.johnnyreilly.com/pull/151 https://github.com/johnnyreilly/blog.johnnyreilly.com/pull/1...
- klodolph 4y agoThe fact that WebP is widely supported, supports lossy compression, and lets you make images with alpha is a killer combination.
- thecsw 4y agoHi! This is the author of the post here. Thank you all for your input and discussion of the term "goated" and different photo formats! I'm not super into photography, I focused mainly on what looks good from a casual browsing experince and also saves space for me. I want to note that there are formats that are meant to supersede WebP, such as AVIF and JPEG XL, however, AVIF (69.25%, I also mainly use Safari) [1] and JPEG XL (0%) [2] are not as nearly adopted as WebP is (91.38%) [3]. Usage taken on April 13th, 2022. Also, get a browser released after 2013. [1] https://caniuse.com/avif https://caniuse.com/avif [2] https://caniuse.com/jpegxl https://caniuse.com/jpegxl [3] https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp
- dTal 4y agoYou would have achieved similarly amazing compression results if you had converted your PNGs to ordinary jpgs - no "state of the art stuff" required. You say you don't care whether it's lossy or lossless as long as it looks good - why were you using such an inappropriate format for photos on the web in the first place?
- thecsw 4y agoTrue, jpegs would have achieved similar. I liked PNGs over the years because of the alpha channel, which was super useful. WebP is the only format I know that is both lossy and has an alpha channel.
- chillfox 4y agoWhat's up with the WebP versions being significantly more saturated?
- bardan 4y agoIs it small of me to have a problem with WebP because of its four letter extension?
- FroshKiller 4y agoIt's a little small of you since file extensions generally have no actual relation to formats. There's nothing stopping you from naming yours .wbp, although I wouldn't expect most programs to accommodate you. I just changed one to .wbp to test with paint.net. The Open File dialog doesn't even have a mask that allows me to show the file. Dragging and dropping resulted in the program complaining, "The image type is not recognized, and cannot be opened" despite WebP having a recognizable header. But I lay that at the feet of the application, not the format. In the end, it's okay to be a little small sometimes. I've held grudges for less myself.
- eternityforest 4y agoEdge and Safari need to stop holding up AVIF!
- dvhh 4y agoEdge lack of support is more baffling, while the Safari one is not
- throwmeariver1 4y agoThe problem with webp is that if you use a good jpg encoder the filesize/quality improvements are negligible especially with the higher parsing time for webp. The problem is like with x264 bad encoders from adobe.
- louissan 4y agoI'm a big fan of webp/avif/jpeg xl but this article sounds to me like "oh look, webp is better than bmp!"....
- Markoff 4y agoWho the heck use PNG for photos and then compare it with WebP optimized for photos? He should have used at least JPEG, JPEG XL, AVIF or whatever other suitable format for photos. This comparison doesn't make sense even if I ignore the fact all photos regardless of format are extremely oversaturated to the point it almost hurt my eyes.
- lionkor 4y agoAfaik they both have an alpha channel
- lionkor 4y agoThis article radiates zoomer energy. That said, interesting, didnt know about webp. Wont use it, but cool ;)