WebP – The Future of Light Weighted Images!

‘WebP conversion’ is a term that has been slowly gaining prominence in recent years. For those of you who have not yet heard of it, ‘WebP’, is an image format that allows you to subject the image to compressions that result in smaller sized, higher quality outputs. Most of the common image formats such as JPG and PNG can be converted to and from this type using one of the many online converter tools available today.

WebP conversions make use of either lossy or lossless image compression techniques in order to create new images while retaining or discarding the original image data. One of the major advantages regarding this image format is that it facilitates working with lightweight web pages and supports faster page loading activities. This can be done thanks to the image’s smaller size which allows the image or images to be loaded quickly on to the web page at speeds that would not normally be possible to achieve without sacrificing the image quality. 

Additionally, when using the WebP converter, you don’t need to use third-party image optimization tools as there is no loss of quality or loss of original image colors when converting to this format. And to top it all off, it’s completely free! The image format was developed by Google as an open source project and remains to this day readily available for the convenience of all users.

Browser and Software Support

Even though the WebP image format and converter were first introduced in 2010, the application is still not in majority use and due to this reason, not all web browsers or user applications support this particular format just yet. At the moment, the browsers that do support this format are Google Chrome and Opera. Additionally, it should be noted that certain graphics software like Picasa, Konverter, Photoline and Adobe Photoshop also support images of this format.

Converting images to WebP

Images which are in regular formats such as JPG, JPEG or PNG can be converted to the WebP format by either installing a converter or by using an online image converter tool. If you decide to download the converter to compress your images then, here’s what you need to do.

First, download and install XnConvert for Windows. This is a specialized conversion software that also supports WebP images and should be set up as the first step since WebP cannot be run on the regular system.

Next, open XnConvert and drag and drop the images that you want to convert on to the provided interface.

Finally, select the image format that you want and click on ‘Convert’ to finish.

If you don’t want to download XnConvert then there are always plenty of online image conversion services like Cloud Convert that support a wide range of image formats. Additionally, you can also make use of the Google WebP codec to access these images through Windows Explorer.

Developer Credits

The WebP image format was developed by Google in 2010 and though it has been 8 years since its initial release, this highly convenient image format has only begun gaining recognition in recent years and we would like to thank Google for this wonderful addition to the web community.