Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.
WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…
It had such a knowledge of the user's needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.
The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90's, which eventually, of course, they did.
Unfortunately, we didn't teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.
Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.
Make default programs support opening webp files and the problem goes away. Until that happens users have every reason to convert files from a format that is a pain in the ass to open.
This. No programs I routinely use images for support it.
Can you list at least a few? Everyone's like "noooo my apps don't support it" but nobody says what apps, what are y'all afraid to admit that you use MS Paint or what?
How about a major one? Discord.
If you send any other image or gif, discord will show the image inline. Webp you have to download.
Want another one? Ifranview. An extremely common image viewer that has hyper customization and widespread support.
Want another one? OBS. Because that's what you need when streaming. Another hoop to jump through in converting the image.
Want another one? Windows. They classify it as html and don't display image data. Just left as white thumbnails.
Want another one? Photopea. Free online photoshop that you can access through web browser.
Want me to stop being bitchy towards you? Set an example and knock it off yourself.
See, that's fair. I don't know why people can't say so. It's time to name and shame companies that can't keep up with the times.
I'm not saying webp is the be-all end-all, but goddamn we need to start using more modern compression for things. Especially gif, which is a fucking horrible format for what people use it today.
I still remember when Internet Explorer wouldn't support png. It takes pressure to get crappy companies to move their ass.
In regards to both Windows and IrfanView, there's a reason why I've been using XnView for 25 years now, with its 500 supported image formats, including webp of course.
I don't know the technical aspects of webp, but as long as it's just another image format, any application that works with images should be able to just support it with an import/export filter. Again, XnView supports 500 formats, so it can't be impossible.
And all my apps support webp so well, I never realized there could be a problem with it except when I heard that Windows is starting to support it and I realised that oh yea, them being slow again.
Again it's not just webp, there's been a ton of attempts to bring better image formats, all the way back to jpeg2000. Some people just don't want to do any amount of work beyond the basics.
We've had the same problem with sound. Lots of good formats in the last 20 years - ogg, flac, aac - yet you can still find things that only play mp3, often only up to a certain bitrate. That's not a good reason why everyone should forever stick only to mp3.
Yet there's never been a problem with adopting new video formats, and that stuff is way harder to implement, often requiring hardware support to be feasible. We're not sticking to 30 years old Real Media and QuickTime. Images deserve better too.
XN all the things, works on just about any major OS too.
Irfanview supports it now, I downloaded a plugin last week that added the format.
Viewing webp is one of the reasons I even swapped to Irfanview.
I use MS paint on a regular basis! I play Civ succession games, so I take some screenshots of the game during my turns. I use Paint to crop them.
The helper utility I've been using can save as bmp, png, gif, or jpg.
The built-in Windows snipping tool can save as png, gif, jpg, or mht (which ends up being bmp under the hood).
Hmm, it might just be time to find a replacement tool.
Haha welcome to my another session of bitching about ancient media formats.
Anyway I'll just recommend XnView to you too. 500 supported image formats, so you can imagine why I get so pissy when people try to convince me that jpg and gif forevaaaa and that webp or whatever is difficult to implement. Maybe give LWF (Lura Wave Format) a shot, that stuff has been around for 20+ years too and can blow jpg out of the water.
Oh XnView can do screenshots and cropping and stuff too. A free program that's been around for 25 years, and for DOS before that. And yet the mainstream sticks to whatever nonsense is the default. It's heartbreaking.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out.
Mostly what I'm looking for is fire-and-forget screenshots. I'll hit alt-printscreen to capture something during the between-turn processing, then go back and crop it and upload it later along with everything else. Tweaking that to a new hotkey -> select the area to screenshot would be fine, but I still want it to automatically save the screenshot in a folder. That was the "killer feature" of the screenie helper I've been using for ages.
Ok I'm not sure if XnView can automatically save a screenshot to a file (I don't have a PC with me), but there are certainly lots of tools that can help with that too.
I use my trusty Paint Shop Pro 7 and Paint Tool SAI, neither of which support it.
MSPaint literally opens WebP files, or at least it does in the most recent Windows 10 version (It doesn't support saving them for some reason though).
But I also don't believe that most apps don't use it, the only app on my system that doesn't support WebP is the default Windows app, which is horrible anyway.
But generally unless you use some very outdated software it should open webps just fine.
Gitlab won't take a webp as a profile picture.