What is WebP? Who should be using it?

• Are you a photographer and you always publish your pictures online?
• Are you a Photoshop designer who either work on pictures taken by cameras or creating something from scratch and you always publish them online?
• Are you an Artist who draw pictures and always publish them online?
• Are a webmaster who is frequently uploading images to your site?
  Or anyone who does frequently uploads his pictures online.

is an image format that provides lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.

WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size than PNGs. It also supports transparency with 22% additional bytes.

WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than JPEG images at equivalent quality index. It also supports transparency, providing 3x smaller file sizes than PNG.

And it supports animated images.

The official website wrote about how it works:

It is supported by most of the well-known browsers:

You can check the quality of the image before and after being converted to WebP here.

You should also know that usually when converting from a lossy format to WebP lossless or vice versa WebP image can grow larger than its source image. And this is mainly due to the colorspace difference (YUV420 vs ARGB) and the conversion between these.

There are tools to convert your images to this format on all know operating systems here.

Images source: Pixabay, Giphy