Just change the extension to PNG
Do people really think this changes the file type?
No I don’t think it does but it works. Specifically I download webp pictures on pc and when I try to send them on WhatsApp it does not recognise them so I change the extension to JPG or PNG and it works it sends them and they can be viewed.
Sounds like the file type verification on WhatsApp is not on mime-type but only on extension. Some receivers might have trouble opening these though.
Well so far I did not encounter any issues so as long as it works I’ll still do it like this
They might use standard imagemagick or such on the backend meaning they can ingest pretty much any image format ever invented, and have a limited set of extensions allowed on the frontend side so people don’t upload
.txt
s.In my experience, WhatsApp does not send an image unchanged. So it doesn’t matter if the recipient can handle it, as long as WhatsApp’s conversion can
Webp is great for web images though, it’s very efficient
JXL is always in my heart though 🪦
In mine too.
Snipping tool is for snipping, screenshots are for cropping.
ffmpeg <3
Ezgif.com has a webp converter
its not hard to extract the image or video from the webp container.
I hate it as much as anyone else at the moment, and maybe I’m just an optimist, but once more support starts rolling out I think it’s going to be great.
yeah it’s supposedly a better format, except nothing seems to support it
If by nothing you mean every browser and most image viewers, then you’re right.
by nothing I mean social media other than lemmy
Who cares about enshittified crap?
People who have friends I guess
Oh, edgy. I prefer messaging for communication. Signal and WhatsApp both support webp.
None of my friends had Signal and I’ve only been able to convince two of them to install it. They only use it to message me. Some have WhatsApp, but most use only Instagram or Facebook Messenger, which both don’t support my .webp memes.
Literally every app that matters supports it.
if you don’t use any social media then sure
I use the Firefox extension Save WebP as PNG or JPEG (Converter).
Same. Very useful.
I got excited when I saw this post because I knew someone in the comments would have a solution!
Semi-related, I’m still salty about Google’s rejection of JPEG XL. I can’t help but remember this when webp discussion crops up, since Google were the ones who created it.
Why care about JPEG XL?
Because it seems very promising.
source with details.
Rejection?
Google started working on JPEG XL support for chrome, then dropped it despite significant industry support. Apple is also in, by the way.
Why do that?
Don’t know, many possible reasons. In fairness, even Mozilla hasn’t decided to fully invest in it, and
libjxl
hasn’t defined a stable public API yet.That said, I don’t believe that’s the kind of issue that’d stop Google if they wanted to push something forward. They’d find a way, funding, helping development, something.
And unfortunately for all of us, Google Chrome sort of… Immensely influences what the web is and will be. They can’t excuse themselves saying “they’ll work on it, if it gains traction” when them supporting anything is fundamental to it gaining traction in the first place.
You’d have to believe Google is acting in good faith for the sake of the internet and its users. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s far from guaranteed and in many issues incredibly unlikely.
Useless mini-rant
I really need a single page with all this information I can link every time image standards in the web are mentioned. There’s stuff I’m leaving out because writing these comments takes some work, especially on a phone, and I’m kinda tired of doing it.
I still hold hope for JPEG XL and that Google will cave at some point.
Not sure what you mean by “Google killed it”. JPEG XL proposal was only submitted in 2018 and it got standardized in 2022. It has a lot of features which are not available in browsers yet, like HDR support (support for HDR photos in Chrome on Android was only added 8 months ago, Firefox doesn’t support HDR in any shape at all), no browsers support 32 bits per component, there’s no support for thermal data or volume data, etc. You can’t just plug libjxl and call it a day, you have to rework your rendering pipeline to add all these features.
I’d argue that Google is actually working pretty hard on their pipeline to add missing features. Can’t say the same about Mozilla, who can’t even implement HDR for videos for over a decade now.
Can you provide a source on how Google is working hard on JPEG-XL missing features?
As I said - photo HDR. Do you even read?
They removed JPEG XL support from chrome. It was behind a feature flag previously.
(At least that’s what I gathered from reading the screenshot.)
Yeah, why keep a feature which doesn’t work? Once they add missing stuff to the renderer, they’ll add XL support back. But I guess that will take a few years.
Just imagine if there was an actual open consortium not spearheaded by monied commercial interests that could temper recent Google decisions. They’ve lost a lot, if not all, of their goodwill with old guard, open web standards nerds. And the old guard that still actively support their standards influencing schemes now make too much money to stop.
Yes, JPEG XL really is the one that got away. 😭
Hey Google, 🖕🖕 for killing it, man. Very evil and self-centered choice.
Also I just noticed what the arrow in the image pointed to. Holy crap that would be awful if true.
Yeah, sorry, that part I didn’t fact check myself so I didn’t even want to mention it. Like I said, many possible reasons.
Ah no worries. I found it a little bit difficult to believe that the decision wouldn’t be questioned by the company if it didn’t align with its overall goals. That would be weird.
Is it still a meme when you feel it in your soul?
I don’t know why, maybe because it’s Sunday morning and I’m just drinking my coffee and browsing around while the rest of the house sleeps in, but this triggered a rabbit hole for me. I already have a lil plugin just for quickly saving direct to PNG or JPG when I right click a WebP in my browsers, but I SHOULDN’T GODDAMN HAVE TO.
WEBP as a wrapper (as coupled along with AVIF/AV1/VP8/etc) seems all about reassertion of corporate control of web file formats by pivoting codecs back toward patent encumbrance as a control factor, just without universal royalty hooks attached to anyone that touches even free and open software utilizing it. We were actually FREE of that bullshit for a short time. PNG has no patent encumbrance. GIF, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 all have expired patents and can be used freely.
[Don’t get me wrong, MPEG as an org was and is pure corruption and greed, and MPEG-4 Part 2 adoption was fully diminished outside of ‘free’ circles based on their stated intention to apply a ‘content fee’ to the royalty requirements. It’s obvious why VP8 -> AV1 had to happen one way or another to break their royalty cabal insanity, but it still doesn’t taste good at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2 ]
The consortium of companies behind WebP and AV1 are all taking part in the enshittification of the entire technology sector, from web sites and web apps, operating systems, and application ecosystems. Why would we ever trust them to not rug pull the ‘irrevocable but revocable’ patent license scheme? They only put it together in the first place to end run having to pay someone who was ‘not them’ any royalties for image/video/audio encoding.
References:
WEBP is patent encumbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP
https://github.com/ImageMagick/webp/blob/main/PATENTS
Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free,** irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license** to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of these implementations of WebM, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by these implementations of WebM. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.
GIF is not patent encumbered since 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
In 2004, all patents relating to the proprietary compression used for GIF expired.
PNG was never patent encumbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG
PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)—unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym “PNG’s not GIF”.
AV1, VP8, VP9, and other modernized “open source” or “free” Video Codecs all appear to be patent encumbered.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23747923
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
Shit, you’ve got me mad too
This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.
IANAL but what they’re saying here seems to be “if you download our code and modify it and, with that modification, touch some other patent of ours we can still have your ass”. That is, the license they’re giving out only cover the code that they release. Which shouldn’t be too controversial, I think.
The issue with codecs in general is that there’s plenty of trolls around and coming up with any audio or video codec is probably going to hit one of their patents, so the best that FLOSS codecs can do is “we don’t have any patents on this” or “we do have patents on this but license them freely, also, if someone else goes after you we’re going to detonate a patent minefield under their ass”. Patent portfolios have essentially reached the level of MAD.
Personally, IDGAF: Software patents aren’t a thing over here. You only have to worry about that stuff if you’re developing silicon.
AV1, VP8, VP9, and other modernized “open source” or “free” Video Codecs all appear to be patent encumbered.
MPEG LA(patent trolls, not to be confused with ISO MPEG) tried to claim that AV1 uses their patents, but failed.
Seems like just another file format to me.
If you want to save a *.webp file, just change the extension to *.png. There is no need for a converter.
Note: this DOES NOT convert the file (obviously) although it will force it to be ‘usable’ in certain cases. If you bring the same file to a program that cannot work with webp format (ex. Da Vinci Resolve), it will crash or not show. To non-creators this is not an issue, but for creators: have fun figuring out which images you’ve saved are actually webp and won’t work later on.
I know webp has become much less annoying after windows finally added webp support to photos after w11, so ‘advice’ like this tends to work more often than not. Just use a browser extension and convert it properly if you intend to spread an image…
have fun figuring out which images you’ve saved are actually webp
file * | grep -i webp
or something?
Are you sure? Maybe your image viewer adapts to the magic number and recognizes the webp file as webp anyway. I believe the formats are fundamentally different.
Sorry, is this comment meant in jest? If not, could you explain what exactly you mean by “no need for a converter?”
I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. No actual file data conversion is happening when you do that unless you’re using additional tools e.g. browser extensions.
Iirc .webp supports a fallback to PNG compression, so this actually works with some.webp files. I could be completely wrong tho.
Hey, thanks for the input. I’d like to read more about this, but I can’t seem to find anything related online. Anything else you could share?
Just checking, you sure you’re not confusing fallback-to-another-format when the browser doesn’t support webp? Because that’s a bit of separate issue, and not a terribly relevant one since all major browsers have supported webp for a while now.
You could’ve tried it yourself in the time it took you to craft this reply.
It has nothing to do with the browser. Change extension or just save originally as .png instead of .webp
Can pop the file right open in any image editor that can fart with pngs, post directly anywhere else, like Discord.
I think I know what you’re talking about, and I think you might have misunderstood a few things. I’ll explain my point and I’d appreciate it if you could confirm later whether it helped, or if I’m the one who misunderstood you.
“Saving as…” is, usually, just for setting the name of the file. The full filename, extension included. The extension is just another part of the name. It doesn’t define what rules the file’s contents actually follow. They’re for other purposes, such as helping your operating system know which software to use when opening each file. For example:
User double clicks a
.pdf
System: Oh, I should try opening this in Adobe Acrobat.But that doesn’t mean the file is actually a PDF. You can change the extension of any file, and it won’t automatically be converted to that extension (unless a specific feature has been added to make that implicit conversion). You could give an executable a
.pdf
extension and your system might then try opening it in Acrobat. Of course, it won’t work—there’s no way the system could have automatically made that conversion for you.So you might wonder, why does your (fake) PNG—which is really just a webp with an incorrect extension—still work just fine? You can open it, view it, send it. What’s the trick?
Thing is, the software that actually deals with those files doesn’t even need to care about the extension, it’s a lot smarter than that. These programs will use things like magic bytes to figure out what the file they’re handling really is and deal with it appropriately.
So in this scenario, the user could save a webp file as PNG.
funny cat.png
(still a webp!)Then they might double click to open it.
System: How do I open a
.png
again?.webp
-> try the image viewer.jpeg
-> try the image viewer.png
-> try the image viewer (there it is)
And finally, the image viewer would correctly identify it as a webp image and display it normally.
Image viewer: reading magic bytes… Image viewer: yeah, that’s a webp alright
The user might then assume that, since everything works as expected, they properly converted their webp to a PNG. In reality, it’s all thanks to these programs, built upon decades of helping users just make things work. Same with Discord, Paint.NET, etc. Any decent software will handle files it’s meant to handle, even if they aren’t properly labeled.
If you were to check the file contents though, using a tool like
file
,czkawka
to find incorrect extensions, or even just checking image properties, it should still be identified as a webp.I didn’t try it myself as you said because, to my understanding of files and software, doing so made no sense. But again, do tell if I got something wrong or misunderstood your comment.
You could’ve tried it yourself in the time it took you to craft this reply.
God I hate it when people have no social skills and talk like this.
How the f— do you know the circumstances of the person you’re talking to? Maybe they don’t have a computer at hand.
Don’t you realize how snotty and bratty and annoying this sounds, regardless?
Bah.
deleted by creator
I do this little trick where I change .webp to .jpg
I do this little trick where I change .webp to .jpg
I hate .webp, almost no software supports it. I can see it reduces the amount of space, but I’m always having to convert it
That format is awful from a user perspective.
Why? I use it all the time and never had issues with it
How so. I get that the support isn’t there yet, but how is the format itself awful
Literally, you answered your own question. From the user end, unsupported file types of any frequently shared format are garbage. No one cares on the user end about server space. They care about sharing a funny image. They don’t care about 2 extra ms of load speed. They want shit to just work.
It’s the same reason Open Office sucks. You can’t rely on it to just work. As much as dev’s hate it (myself too), reliability is king. Webp fails this measure, badly.
The format itself is perfectly fine, it’s just that most software doesn’t work with formats made in the 21st century
The only program that I ever use that doesn’t support webp is Facebook Messenger.
Lucky
It performs like trash when trying to copy to text messages.