As an alternative to JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, WebP was designed by Google to support lossy and lossless compression as well as animation and alpha transparency.

From that moment on, it was Google itself who further developed this format by adding new features and who made sure that the engine of its Chrome browser began to support this compression format. In short, it is a file format created by Google to reduce the size of images and thus reduce their loading time .

Something that, on the other hand, has become a necessity because today, most of the time we browse the Internet, we do it from our mobile. In this way there is a saving in bandwidth and, therefore, a faster loading of the images of those websites that use this image format.

As a result, we have created this free tool that let you convert images to webp format for free without any limits.

For WebP lossless compression, the first thing to highlight is the image transformation process, for which different techniques can be used:

• Transformations based on spatial predictions : WebP uses different prediction modes that take advantage of the simple fact that the closest pixels are usually correlated. To do this, the actual value of the pixels is predicted from the pixels that have already been encoded and only the residual value is encoded.
• Color Transformation : The only purpose is the decorrelation of the RGB values ​​of each pixel. To do this, the image is divided into blocks before red is transformed from green and blue from green and red, the only color that keeps its value being green.
• Transformation by subtraction of the green color : It is an additional option to transform the color where the green comes out of the red and blue values ​​of each pixel.
• Indexed Color Transformation : The WebP format also offers the ability to do such a transformation through a process where the number of unambiguous RGBA values ​​is determined. If the result is too low, an array with these colors is created and used to replace the pixel values ​​with the corresponding index.
• Cache color coding : The lossless compression of this format can use the fragments of the image already seen to reconstruct new pixels. Now, if it doesn’t get any proper results, it will fall back on the local color cache with the last 32 colors used as the build point.

The JPG or JPEG format has been the most used on the Internet for decades, however, WebP has proven to be much more efficient thanks to one of the main advantages over JPG, since it offers a lossy and a lossless compression method. However, this form offers other advantages such as:

• Space saving : As we have already mentioned, the WebP compression format means that the images take up much less space on our disk or server with the same quality as an image in JPG or PNG format.
• Reduced compression time : Not only is it important that they take up little space, but it is also crucial that they load quickly in the browser. In this sense, the format created by Google also far exceeds the decoding and loading times of other image formats.
• Transparency support : In addition, it is a format that supports the transparency of images.
• Animation support : And as if that were not enough, it also supports animation, which also makes it a great rival to the GIF format.

But since everything could not be perfect, we must also take into account certain details of this format. One of them is its maximum resolution in pixels, 16,383 × 16,383 . Although it is very large, the truth is that it is much smaller than the maximum resolution offered by JPEG, since it reaches 65,535×65,535 pixels, although it is true that we will never use images at any of these sizes on a website.

The other great detail to take into account is the limitation offered by the WebP format with respect to some browsers , since it is not possible to open this file format with most applications for viewing images.

We can use web browsers that natively integrate the format, with native tools or external programs depending on the needs and purpose.

with web browsers

If we are one of those who use the Google web browser, it is possible that when downloading an image in WebP format, if we have Chrome as the default browser on our computer, it is most likely that the browser itself will be associated as the default application to open the image.

If not, we can open an image in this format simply by dragging it over a Chrome window. Other Chromium-based browsers also offer us this support, although certain older versions may not yet support it. Something that can also happen to us with other web browsers, therefore, we can use our browser to open an image in this format depending on the browser and its version.

Opera (also in its Mobile and Mini versions) is another of the web browsers that integrates compatibility with the WebP image format, so there will be two alternatives for default programs when opening one of these files, all you have to do is double click the file to open it with that browser. In the Apple ecosystem we can open these files by double-clicking on them and the Preview tool will take care of viewing it, although Safari is also compatible from version 14 and later in both the mobile and desktop versions. But more and more web browsers are supported, such as Android Browser, UC Browser, Samsung Internet and QQ Browser .

in photoshop

But if what we want is to open an image in this format with some image viewing or editing tool, then we will have to look for one that supports this format. If you are one of those who use Photoshop, surely you have already noticed that if we try to open a WebP file, the Adobe tool will show us a message indicating that it is not possible because it is not the correct type of document.

However, there is a way to be able to open files of this format with the Adobe tool, by installing a plugin that offers us this support.

other graphic design apps such as GIMP can open WebP images normally without any issues. In short, the future is going towards WebP.

If you have a blog or any website and you want the search engines to be happy from you, consider converting your images to WebP using our tool (convert images to WebP).

with our tool, you can now convert images to webp format for free without any limits. Please email us at [email protected] if you find any issue/s with our tool mentioning “Convert images to webp format)” in the message.