webp - the webs image format?
Today nearly everyone downloads, views or creates digital images and photos taken by smartphones or (semi-)professional digital photo cameras. These images are stored in an 30 years old image file format known as JPEG. Around 12 years ago Google introduced the WEBP image format which promises a reduction of file size by even better image quality. But this WEBP image format was ignored by major software vendors a long time. Today in 2022 all major web browsers and mobile devices are supporting this image format finally. Lets take a look at an example (1000x750 Pixel):
Perito-Moreno glacier in 2013 JPEG Format: 260kB
Perito-Moreno glacier in 2013 WEBP Format: 72kB
Conversion tools
Currently there are some popular open source tools which support converting images to webp image format. The following list shows the tools I used within my automated conversion script:
Automated conversion
To automate the conversion, judging and selecting the best converted image I wrote a bash script called ksvu-webp.sh.
The ksvu-webp.sh tool uses the above mentioned image processing tools to automate the conversion of existing jpg, png or gif images to the webp format. The final step is choosing the file with the smallest file size after converting an image from selected conversion tools.
ImageMagick is very powerful and provides many tools to manipulate and query image information. Therefore the tool is mandatory and needs to be installed on the system to use the ksvu-webp.sh. If ImageMagick version 7 is used ksvu-webp.sh supports to convert to webp using a target SSIM value.
Download
The script is maintained on github and can be downloaded using git:
git clone git@github.com:klimaschutz-von-unten-de/webp.git
or directly by this link: ksvu-webp.sh.
Author
The ksvu-webp.sh is written and maintained by Stefan Ruppert author of the climate protection bottom-up blog (in german https://klimaschutz-von-unten.de/.
Contact
Mail: Stefan Ruppert, Twitter: https://twitter.com/unten_de.