When working with our own images or with those of third parties, there are many photo editing programs that we can draw on. These solutions help us to convert, retouch, or improve our photos in a more or less advanced way. Here we can mention programs like Photoshop or GIMP, two of the most popular in the world.
It is true that despite its power and widespread use globally, there is an aspect that differentiates both programs in an important way. Specifically, we mean that the first one, owned by Adobe , is paid, and the second is an open source project, free. Over the years, the two proposals have evolved and grown substantially, also adapting to the most current times.
This refers to both the more advanced functions for photo editing, such as the user interface, or working with the latest image formats. Well, in these lines we are going to focus on a function of the free proposal, GIMP , which perhaps many of you did not know it had. Specifically, we mean that currently open source software has the ability to save files in WebP format.
GIMP already has support for saving photos in WebP
It is for all this that in these lines we are going to show you how to achieve it, something that will surely be very helpful to a large number of users in these times. It should be mentioned first of all that the WebP format is relatively modern and that not all photo editors are trained to work with it.
However, as we mentioned before, GIMP is perfectly capable of all this, as we will show you below. So, first of all we will tell you that exporting files to WebP in the GIMP program is very easy, as we will review. Of course, the first thing we are going to need is to have the free program installed on the PC , an application that we can download from this link . And it is necessary to take into account that despite being a zero cost software, the power and functionality that it provides us is beyond doubt.
Furthermore, it could be said that it is an excellent alternative to the aforementioned Adobe Photoshop , but without having to pay a single euro. So what we do next is open the photo that we want to convert to WebP so that we can work with it here or in other programs.
Export to WebP from GIMP in seconds
Therefore, in order to save an image in WebP format in GIMP, once we have the original on the screen, we go to the File / Export as menu option. Keep in mind that GIMP is a bit strange here. We say this because if we try to save an image, in principle the program only allows us to do it as an XCF file. Therefore, if we need it to be saved in any other format, such as WebP, JPG or PNG , we need to export it.
When the export window opens, we must select the WebP type from the drop-down menu under Select file type by extension. Of course, before GIMP exports the image to a WebP format, we will see a pop-up window that will ask us about the quality we want to use in the new image. It is recommended at this point that we check the No loss box.
To finish we will tell you that at the moment applications such as Google Chrome , Firefox, Edge or Opera support the WebP image format, which allows a more optimized and faster upload of photos.
