You may have seen a new photo file format on the rise, Google's own WebP. Here's how the format works, what it's good for, and everything else you should know.

Google is promoting a new image format, aimed at overthrowing the venerable JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Naturally, WebP is faster, and it’s open source. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers squint at their pixels.

WebP was created as an improved version of JPEG, PNG, and GIF, with more flexibility and smaller file sizes than those older formats. Widespread adoption took a long time, but it’s now fully ...

The image format 'WebP ' developed by Google to reduce the traffic volume of websites is intended to replace lossy compressed JPEG , lossless compressed GIF , and PNG , and is animated like APNG ...

This means that websites using .webp files will have to serve JPEG or PNG versions of those images to users accessing the site through Microsoft Edge in Internet Explorer mode.

One response from Alpha (Hin-Chung) Lam, analyzing 63 cat videos from Tumblr, found animated WebP file sizes to be 38 percent of the animated GIF format originals.

If you've got a WebP image that you need to edit but can't, converting it to JPG or PNG format might solve your problems. Here's how to do it.

Web developers and graphic artists who want to try the data-saving graphics format now have two choices of open-source plug-ins for Photoshop.

Regarding GIF conversion to WebP, note that old browsers, such as Safari 15.6 (macOS Catalina) and older, don’t support animated WebP formats.