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From what I've seen WebP is probably the strongest contender for a JPEG replacement. It's pretty common in the indie game scene for example to re-encode a JPEG

From what I've seen WebP is probably the strongest contender for a JPEG replacement. It's pretty common in the indie game scene for example to re-encode a JPEG game to WebP for better image quality and often a significant (25% or more) savings on installer size. Support is coming, albeit somewhat slowly. It was pretty bad in Ubuntu 22, but several apps have added support in Ubuntu 24. Windows 11 supports WebP in Photos and Paint for another example.

Sammi 1y ago
Also webp support in browsers is looking pretty good these days: https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp The last major browser to add support was Safari 16 and that was released on September 12, 2022. I see pretty much no one on browsers older than Safari 16.4 in metrics on websites I run.
- turnsout 1y ago
  Yeah, after seeing the logs I made the switch to webp earlier this year. As much as I hate to admit it (not a fan of Google), it’s a pretty big bandwidth savings for the same (or better) quality.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    I switched to webp on my forum for avatars and other user image uploads. With one format you get decent filesize, transparency, and animation which makes things much simpler than doing things like conditionally producing gifs vs jpegs.
- userbinator 1y ago
  People want to use images outside of browsers too.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    What apps are you using in 2025 that handle images but doesn't support webp? I can't think of any on my Fedora desktop for instance.
    - jcynix 1y ago
      Luminar Neo, for example, doesn't handle webp. And there's more than just Fedora, IIRC.
    - wongarsu 1y ago
      Lots of websites that expect me to upload images only accept jpeg and png. Another one I recently interacted with are video backgrounds for zoom. Those apparently can only be jpeg, not even png
- out_of_protocol 1y ago
  .. or you can go directly to avif - https://caniuse.com/avif https://caniuse.com/avif (93%) instead of webp (95% support).
  - Sammi 1y ago
    I'd love to see a comparison of the computational expense of avif compared to webp. I know av1, which avif is based off, is pretty hard on the hardware.
    - out_of_protocol 1y ago
      https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front See various charts. For example, this table: https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/images/f_auto,q_auto/v1709249796/Web_Assets/blog/Screen-Shot-2024-02-29-at-3.35.25-PM/Screen-Shot-2024-02-29-at-3-35-25-PM-png?_i=AA https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/images/f_aut... For decoding, Webp - ~70Mpx/s, jpeg - 100 to 300 Mpx/s Jpeg xl - 115 to 163 Avif (single thread) - 32 to 37 Avif (multithread) - 90 to 110
0x20cowboy 1y ago
I hate webp. Not for any legitimate technical reason like, but I often just want to download an image from the web for an image board or drop it in a diagram or ppt or for a joke and nothing works with that format. Nothing. Google image search is useless because of it. Cmd+shift+4 is now the only way to grab an image out of a browser. Which is annoying. It has made my life needlessly more complicated. I wish it would go away. Maybe if browsers auto converted when you dragged ann image out of the browser window I wouldn’t care, but when I see webp… I hate.
- wang_li 1y ago
  On the classic macs they’re was a program called DropDisk. You could drag a disk image to it and it auto mounted it. That suggests a tool for you. Make a desktop app that you can drag and drop images on that converts them to jpeg and saves them in a folder.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - msephton 1y ago
    You can create this using Automator in a minute.
  - jamiek88 1y ago
    thumbsup app does exactly this.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Webp images are right up there with the fake transparent PNGs you come across in Google Images.
- nntwozz 1y ago
  I use ThumbsUp a free utility from https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware to convert webp/heic or whatever inconvenient format. Just drop the offending image onto the icon in the dock.
graealex 1y ago
> It's pretty common in the indie game scene That's such a weak argument. If I was an indie game developer, I would use whatever obscure format would offer me the most benefit, since I control the pipeline from the beginning (raw TIFF/TGA/PNG/... files) to the end (the game that needs to have a decoder and will uncompress it into GPU memory). 20 minutes extra build-time on the dev machine is irrelevant when I can save hundreds of MBs. However, that is not the benchmark for a format widely used on the internet. Encoding times multiply, as does the need to search for specialized software, and literally everyone else needs to support the format to be able to view those files.
aidenn0 1y ago
FWIW, the day I discovered jpegli[1] I left WebP behind. Similar sizes to WebP while maintaining JPEG compatibility. 1: https://github.com/google/jpegli https://github.com/google/jpegli

Sammi 1y ago

Also webp support in browsers is looking pretty good these days: https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp The last major browser to add support was Safari 16 and that was released on September 12, 2022. I see pretty much no one on browsers older than Safari 16.4 in metrics on websites I run.

turnsout 1y ago
Yeah, after seeing the logs I made the switch to webp earlier this year. As much as I hate to admit it (not a fan of Google), it’s a pretty big bandwidth savings for the same (or better) quality.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  I switched to webp on my forum for avatars and other user image uploads. With one format you get decent filesize, transparency, and animation which makes things much simpler than doing things like conditionally producing gifs vs jpegs.
userbinator 1y ago
People want to use images outside of browsers too.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  What apps are you using in 2025 that handle images but doesn't support webp? I can't think of any on my Fedora desktop for instance.
  - jcynix 1y ago
    Luminar Neo, for example, doesn't handle webp. And there's more than just Fedora, IIRC.
  - wongarsu 1y ago
    Lots of websites that expect me to upload images only accept jpeg and png. Another one I recently interacted with are video backgrounds for zoom. Those apparently can only be jpeg, not even png
out_of_protocol 1y ago
.. or you can go directly to avif - https://caniuse.com/avif https://caniuse.com/avif (93%) instead of webp (95% support).
- Sammi 1y ago
  I'd love to see a comparison of the computational expense of avif compared to webp. I know av1, which avif is based off, is pretty hard on the hardware.
  - out_of_protocol 1y ago
    https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front See various charts. For example, this table: https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/images/f_auto,q_auto/v1709249796/Web_Assets/blog/Screen-Shot-2024-02-29-at-3.35.25-PM/Screen-Shot-2024-02-29-at-3-35-25-PM-png?_i=AA https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/images/f_aut... For decoding, Webp - ~70Mpx/s, jpeg - 100 to 300 Mpx/s Jpeg xl - 115 to 163 Avif (single thread) - 32 to 37 Avif (multithread) - 90 to 110

0x20cowboy 1y ago

I hate webp. Not for any legitimate technical reason like, but I often just want to download an image from the web for an image board or drop it in a diagram or ppt or for a joke and nothing works with that format. Nothing. Google image search is useless because of it. Cmd+shift+4 is now the only way to grab an image out of a browser. Which is annoying. It has made my life needlessly more complicated. I wish it would go away. Maybe if browsers auto converted when you dragged ann image out of the browser window I wouldn’t care, but when I see webp… I hate.

wang_li 1y ago
On the classic macs they’re was a program called DropDisk. You could drag a disk image to it and it auto mounted it. That suggests a tool for you. Make a desktop app that you can drag and drop images on that converts them to jpeg and saves them in a folder.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- msephton 1y ago
  You can create this using Automator in a minute.
- jamiek88 1y ago
  thumbsup app does exactly this.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Webp images are right up there with the fake transparent PNGs you come across in Google Images.
nntwozz 1y ago
I use ThumbsUp a free utility from https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware to convert webp/heic or whatever inconvenient format. Just drop the offending image onto the icon in the dock.

graealex 1y ago

> It's pretty common in the indie game scene That's such a weak argument. If I was an indie game developer, I would use whatever obscure format would offer me the most benefit, since I control the pipeline from the beginning (raw TIFF/TGA/PNG/... files) to the end (the game that needs to have a decoder and will uncompress it into GPU memory). 20 minutes extra build-time on the dev machine is irrelevant when I can save hundreds of MBs. However, that is not the benchmark for a format widely used on the internet. Encoding times multiply, as does the need to search for specialized software, and literally everyone else needs to support the format to be able to view those files.

aidenn0 1y ago

FWIW, the day I discovered jpegli[1] I left WebP behind. Similar sizes to WebP while maintaining JPEG compatibility. 1: https://github.com/google/jpegli https://github.com/google/jpegli