On the other hand, lossy compression, similar to JPEG, involves sacrificing some non-essential information to achieve smaller file sizes. Although this may result in a slight decrease in image quality, it offers the advantage of significantly reducing file size, which can be advantageous for web performance and storage. The WebP format intends to provide higher-quality images in comparable file size to JPEG. However, AVIF provides even greater compression while retaining image quality (for both lossy and lossless compression). WebP compression can have side effects like blockiness and color banding.
What is WebP?
Even relatively small efficiency wins start to add up at Facebook’s scale. When people upload JPEG/JPG images, Facebook automatically makes copies in WebP format. They’ve now apparently begun delivering those images to people using Chrome and Opera.
BMP (Bitmap file)
Unfortunately, PNG is usually larger in image size and doesn’t support animation. With 60%-65% of bytes on most web pages being images, Google set out to create a free, open-source file format that stores both lossy and lossless compression formats in high-quality. While maintaining quality but reducing the size of images, pages load faster, use less bandwidth, and save battery power—especially on mobile—when pages use WebP images. As the digital calendar flips to 2024, the importance of converting to WebP becomes more apparent than ever. WebP is becoming increasingly popular among website owners due to its ability to reduce image file size without sacrificing quality. In the coming years, more websites will likely start using WebP files, particularly as this image format becomes more widely supported by browsers.
- IrfanView, Windows Photo Viewer, and Photoshop all require plugins to open WebP images.
- It’s worth playing around with this, findwhich level is the right tradeoff between image quality and filesize for yourneeds.
- Lossy compression reduces file size, but at the expense of possiblyreducing image quality.
- The HTTP archive’s studies show the average weight of a desktop webpage has ballooned from 523 kilobytes in 2011 to 2196 kilobytes in 2021.
Why did Google release WebP as open source?
If you want to view WebP images outside of a browser, you can use image viewers or editors that support the format, such as IrfanView or GIMP. Let’s bring our knowledge of WebP to some constructive and creative use. We will look at how to make stickers for Coding Telegram from a JPEG image and convert it to a .webp file. File sizes below the thumbnails correspond to the files sizes of the imagesviewed when clicking the thumbnails. When it comes to other software, not all of them support the WebP format. Some image viewers and image editing tools can’t open WebP files.
And if you’re not inclined toward the command line, Squoosh will serve us just as well for encoding WebP. It gives us the optionof side-by-side comparisons between different encodings, settings, quality levels, and differences in file size from JPEG encoding. In truth, both PNG and JPEG also do this sort of prediction to some degree. The results provided by each prediction mode are then compared to the real image data, and the closestpredictive match is selected.
The settings dialogue for lossy WebP gives more flexibility for configuring the output. When converting images to WebP, experiment with compression settings to find the right balance between file size and image quality. Even slight adjustments can lead to significant savings in bandwidth and loading times. Unlike traditional formats such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF, WebP supports both lossless (perfect quality) and lossy (slightly reduced quality) compression, along with transparency and animation. WebP with lossy compression results in file sizes 3 times smaller than comparable PNGs. It’s specifically designed to be used on websites, and it is designed as a better alternative to JPG and PNG files.
The benefits of using WebP images when building websites
- The easiest way is to use an online tool like CloudConvert to convert the WebP images to other formats.
- CMSs like Webflow and graphics tools like Photoshop now commonly support WebP images as well.
- It’s specifically designed to be used on websites, and it is designed as a better alternative to JPG and PNG files.
- The highly optimized compression algorithm means that files can be much smaller than JPGs at equivalent image quality.
- The standalone libwebp library serves as a referenceimplementation for the WebP specification, and is available fromour git repository or as a tarball.
- There are plenty of free and premium plugins available on WordPress that allow you to convert images to WebP.
- If there are not many unique pixel values, it may be more efficient to createa color index array and replace the pixel values by the array’s indices.
Each pixel in a GIF is represented by a single 8-bit value serving as an index into a palette of 24-bit colors (8 bits each of red, green, and blue). These terms identify what happens when image compression is reversed. Lossy compression loses data when the file is decompressed, webp vs png while lossless loses very little to no data.
When finished, open your text editor and create a new file named webp.js in your web project’s root folder. On a doddering mobile connection, you can even see these images unfurl before you like a descending window shade. We combine our own experience and independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great creative apps or royalty-free sources, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).