WebP: Advantages and How to Open Files with This Image Format

Although computers, mobiles and tablets are increasingly powerful, the truth is that today the websites we visit have more and more quality content. This means that if we visit one of these websites loaded with multimedia content with a computer with somewhat more limited hardware, we will see how the time or speed of loading is reduced compared to other websites of lower weight. In this sense, the images contained in a web page are undoubtedly one of the biggest responsible for slow loading. If we add to this that a single page can have a lot of high quality images, then the thing can be complicated. However, a few years ago the WebP format began to be used, a more efficient way for images on the Internet.

Perhaps on more than one occasion we have found that when downloading an image from a website, when going to the route where we have saved it, we find a file in .Webp format. An image that later, we may not know with which tool we can open or that we are directly associated with our web browser and opened directly with it. Next, we are going to show what exactly this image format is and what advantages it offers us.

What is WebP?

Webp or ” weppy ” which is how many pronounce it, is a graphic format in the form of a container that arises in 2010 from the hand of Google and that supports both lossless and lossless compression . A format derived from the VP8 video standard developed by On2 Technologies and that Google acquired that same year.

From that moment, it was Google itself who further developed this format by adding new features and the one who took care that the Chrome browser’s own engine began to support this compression format.

webp

In short, it is a file format created by Google to reduce the size of the images and thus reduce the loading time of them . Something that on the other hand, has become a necessity because today, most of the time we surf the Internet, we do it from the 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.

Approximately, images in this compression format are 30% smaller than the same image in other usual formats such as JPG, JPEG or PNG with the same image quality and based on their own compression methods. While JPG files are based on a lossy compression method, PNG files do the same but without loss, and it is the WebP that supports both possibilities .

Advantages and disadvantages of WebP versus JPEG

The JPG or JPEG format has been the most used on the Internet for decades, however, WebP has demonstrated without much more efficient thanks to one of the main advantages over JPG, since it offers a lossy and lossless compression method. However, this form offers other advantages such as:

  • Space saving : As we have already mentioned, the WebP compression format makes images take up much less space on our disk or server with the same quality of 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 the load on the browser be fast. 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 image transparency.
  • Animation support : And if that were not enough, it also supports animation, which also makes it a great rival of the GIF format.

But as 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 lower 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 web.

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.

How to open and convert WebP files

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 we associate the browser itself as the default application to open 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 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.

But if what we want is to open an image in this format with some visualization or image 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.

How to open a WebP file in Photoshop

However, there is a way to open files of this format with the Adobe tool, installing a plugin that offers this support. These are the steps we must follow:

  • We download the plugin from the official software website . (We must choose between the 32 and 64 bit version).
  • Unzip the downloaded file on our disk.

WebP

  • We open a file explorer and go to the path where we have Photoshop installed.
  • Inside the plug-ins folder, we copy the WebPFormat64.8bi file that we find among those that we have decompressed.

WebP

  • We reopen Photoshop and try to open a WebP file.
  • If everything went well, we will see that it is already possible to open this type of files with Photoshop.

Another free alternative to view photos in this format

We can also use a tool with IrFanView. A free software available for Windows with support for viewing images in this format and that we can download directly from this link to the official website of the tool .

As soon as you download it, we double-click on the .exe file that has been saved to us on the disk and the installation wizard will automatically be shown. In a couple of clicks, we will have the tool completely and available for use in our equipment. Now, to be able to open WebP files from it, we will have to have the corresponding plugin.

WebP

Therefore, the next thing we have to do is:

  • We go to the official IrFanView website.
  • We download the plugin installer for the version of our Windows.
  • We execute the downloaded .exe file.
  • We open IrFanView on our desktop.
  • We tried to open a WebP file.
  • If the installation of the tool and the plugins has been successful, we can open any image in this format.

Although it is an image viewer that supports these types of formats, it also has some very basic editing tools. Therefore, we can make certain clippings on an image if necessary from the IrFanView image viewer itself .

You can also convert a WebP file to other image formats

If we need to open a file in this format from a computer that does not have the Microsoft operating system or on which we cannot install third-party applications, then what we can do is convert WebP to JPG, PNG, GIF or other formats.

And stop it, we will not need to install anything on our computer. We just have to open the web browser and visit one of the online sites where we can convert images from one format to another. One of the most popular and used is ezgif.com , a website where we can convert a WebP file to GIF, PNG, JPG or MP4 and vice versa in just a couple of clicks and for free.

All we have to do is visit the ezgif site , select the type of conversion we want to perform, for example WebP to JPG and then upload the file or indicate the URL where it is and click on the Upload button. In a few moments the image will be loaded, on which we can make certain editing options such as crop, resize, rotate, optimize, add text or add certain effects, among others.

With everything ready, all we have left is to click on the Convert to JPG button or the output format that we have chosen and then we can proceed with the download of the result. Now, with the image in JPG format, we can open it in any other image viewer or photo editing tool not compatible with this format without any problem.