Today's article is about WebP images in Linux Mint...

[KGIII]

This is labeled as Linux Mint because that's the only place I've tested it. The default image viewer wouldn't render WebP graphics (a popular form of graphics for the 'net these days). Sure, I could use XnView if I wanted, but that's not what I wanted. So, I did some digging. I tried various things I found via the web until one of 'em actually worked.

Open 'WebP' Images In Linux Mint • Linux Tips

Today's article shouldn't be all that complicated, as we're just going to touch on how to open WebP images in Linux Mint.

linux-tips.us

I probably should have gone on to explain how to then make the default image viewer open WebP files automatically, but I didn't think of that until now. Also, it would have made the article much longer.

 

[Condobloke]

Just while my memory has this fact retained....I have found that if I was to save a webp image to my desktop, with the aim of expanding it in order to lend greater definition/size to some particular aspect of the pic....using my scroll button on the opened webp image accomplishes nothing...it stays the same size

Also being inherently lazy, I have , on occasion, changed the name webp in properties to .jpeg or .jpg......and it has worked.

I have a memory that i tried to save it in something else, but had no success. I canna remember what I tried to use

 

[Condobloke]

I am searching for a webp pic to experiment with again

Worth noting...Linux.org does not support that image format either

WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency.

Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018.

 

[rossdv8]

Just as a matter of interest, I just checked in my Linux Mint and so far about a dozen of my Image Viewers open .webp images.

Now, I am running Mint 21.2 KDE, but I am not sure if it is Mint 21.2 that has enabled this change, or the fact that I am running Mint 21.2 on the Linux 6.1 kernel.

If it was the kernel that fixed it, ir was due to updating to kernel 6 by:
sudo apt-get install linux-oem-22.04c

and a reboot.

At any rate, it might be worth a try. A lot of new things are happening with the move to kernel 6. You'd probably want to be using at least Mint 21.1 though.

 

[camtaf]

Not that I download webp images, but wouldn't a web browser display them(?).

 

[arochester]

In Chromium, probably other browsers, there is an extension called "Save Image as Type."

It allows you to "Save image as PNG, JPG or WebP by context menu on image."

It will change WebP as JPEG.

 

[Condobloke]

In Chromium, probably other browsers, there is an extension called "Save Image as Type."

It allows you to "Save image as PNG, JPG or WebP by context menu on image."

It will change WebP as JPEG.

Thank you @arochester .....works like a charm.

 

[MikeWalsh]

We had quite a long discussion about this stuff back in February on the Puppy Forum. Originally, the poster was concerned with 'managing' WebP images within SeaMonkey, which doesn't seem to like handling them.

Some research ensued, and one of our members came across this page from Google (they being the originators of WebP, more than a decade ago):-

An Image Format for the Web

It's been in existence for years, yet it's only in the last 2-3 years that more than a handful of web-developers have begun to adopt it full-time. It's a 'sister project' to the WebM project.....the modern video container, again optimised for the internet, and specifically designed to cut down on data loss during uploads/downloads & transfers.

The upshot of all this was that I took Google's own specially-compiled WebP binary tools, and built a small utility for Puppy in ROX-filer's own 'native' portable format, the ROX-App. It lets you convert back & forth between WebP/JPG & WebP/PNG, these being the two most common image formats.

Drag'n'drop your image into the small extra window that pops-up, and hit the appropriate 'Convert' button. Works nicely.

Any Puppy users interested can find it here:-

MediaFire

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.

www.mediafire.com

64-bit only, I'm afraid. Google turned their backs on 32-bit stuff years ago...

(I had an ulterior motive in building this anyway. I have a couple of albums of several hundred images a friend sent me, more than half of which are in WebP format. Although you can view them with something like gThumb, I wanted to convert the whole lot into PNG format - easier for 'sharing' with other folks - and this utility enabled me to do just that).


Mike.

 

[MikeWalsh]

Not that I download webp images, but wouldn't a web browser display them(?).

It certainly would. Most current, modern browsers will, anyway.

The other thing with this is that many folks aren't aware that you can use any web-browser as a 'local' file-manager in a pinch. This is exactly what Google do with Chromebooks and ChromeOS.....the entire OS is built around the Chrome browser.


Mike.

 

[KGIII]

Well, this is what I get for being offline for a while...

Also being inherently lazy, I have , on occasion, changed the name webp in properties to .jpeg or .jpg......and it has worked.

I tried this and I couldn't make it work. I even renamed it the original extension. That could just be something on my end. I just couldn't make it work for me. I found a way to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, but figured it'd be nice to have the default editor actually support WebP in the future.

Worth noting...Linux.org does not support that image format either

I am not surprised. My site requires an extension to do this and I do so to save bandwidth. I don't have a lot of graphics, but I like to save bandwidth when I can. It also should, at least in theory, load faster.

Just as a matter of interest, I just checked in my Linux Mint and so far about a dozen of my Image Viewers open .webp images.

Yup. That's why this article is about the default image viewer. XnView opens pretty much everything if you're curious. Shutter, the app I use to edit images 'cause I only do basic editing, also wouldn't work with them. I could have probably done that in XnView as well.

but wouldn't a web browser display them(?).

Yes, that's in the article.

In Chromium, probably other browsers, there is an extension called "Save Image as Type."

Yup, that's an option. It's probably among the better options, but where's the fun in that?!?

It's been in existence for years, yet it's only in the last 2-3 years that more than a handful of web-developers have begun to adopt it full-time.

I suspect it'll become more popular as time passes. It's really easy to set up. I actually generate .png images and I have added an extension to WordPress that does all the work for me. It may not seem like it saves much bandwidth, but all those little images add up.

It probably saves me an extra few hundred MB each month. I want the site to load relatively quickly, so I pay another company to provide CDN services. The lighter images mean lower CDN costs. I like using the CDN, which basically means when you visit my site you're viewing a cached version that's geographically close to you, or at least closer than it would be if I just had the server in the US.

There... I think I responded to everyone that said something that should have a response.

 

[osprey]

Also being inherently lazy, I have , on occasion, changed the name webp in properties to .jpeg or .jpg......and it has worked.

The answer to most simple graphics format conversions is the convert command (from the imagemagick package) which handles webp graphics among all the others commonly used. Front end GUIs often use it at the backend.

 

[KGIII]

The answer to most simple graphics format conversions is the convert command (from the imagemagick package) which handles webp graphics among all the others commonly used.

I know this is a closed source application, but if you ever end up with some really obscure image format, look up XnView, though I guess they call it XnViewMP now for multiplatform. It was a brilliant Windows application that they've ported to Linux. I was so happy when I learned that they had done so. It happily works with hundreds of image file types.

Lemme dig out a link...

Supported graphic and image formats | XnView.com

www.xnview.com

That happily worked with WebP, but that wasn't really the article's objective. The goal was to get the default image viewer to work with WebP files. But, yeah, XnView is pretty much the bee's knees, even though it's proprietary.

 

[KGIII]

I got a number of emails. My site was down - and down hard. It's still not perfect, but it's up and running. There's still some database issues that you shouldn't see.

Which is to say...

I pay for a 'reseller' account. In fact, I pay for more than one.

For some reason, today just decided to be the day that it all fell apart. I had a bunch of emails to deal with and the fires were eventually put out. The outage was such that it ruined the IP addresses and resulted in a system-wide IP address change (which was a long way coming). As I rely on a CDN, that's a ton of extra settings that you're not sure if they'll work.

So, I kicked all this upstream. It took a bit, but they figured it all out and I even let them log in to my CDN. They made some changes there and that was the extent of it.

It turns out that I wasn't hacked. No personal data was lost. It was just a weird combination of fires that all turned into a blaze today.

 

[BigBadBeef]

WebP is a pain in the anal cavity, even on windows. I don't see any intrinsic value in it existing at all, its insipid and irritating.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

It does compress better than JPEG under some circumstances...

EDIT: LOL also it could support more than 256 colors because GIF has been long in the tooth. In case anybody is interested doing it to an image which could fit into a 4k screen.

Firefox usually gives me a dialog asking about a "handler". I just open it in GIMP and then resave it as JPEG. However the WEBP is downloaded anyway. Imagemagick should be able as well to handle this format.

 

[KGIII]

I don't see any intrinsic value in it existing at all, its insipid and irritating.

It's useful for having smaller images that scale up nicely. It's good for reducing bandwidth and load times.