Post

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

How late to the party am I on WebP? I only recently started using it as my preferred format for non-photo images and it's SO MUCH smaller than PNG, and looks much better than JPG used to shrink down screenshots too Has everyone else been having a WebP party without me for years?

1 repost77 likes

Signez · Stan Signoud
@signez.fr

I have to concur with all the other replies that suggest that you look to AVIF; I am a huge JXL fan and I hope we will use it as a near-Pareto format as the "don't have to think about it" option, but in the mean time, AVIF is a very good option that will provide better results that WebP every time!

Charl P. Botha
@charlbotha.com

Caveat emptor! I also used to love WebP, until I discovered that by design it has no support for any kind of HDR. In contrast, AVIF supports HDR both through higher bit depth, e.g. 10 bpp, and also through gain maps, and compresses at least as well as WebP. cpbotha.net/2025/12/25/w...

cpbotha.netWeekly Head Voices #263: High Dynamic LifeWell will you look at that date… Merry Christmas everyone! I would also like to welcome you to the 263d edition of the Weekly Head Voices, a surprise even to me that it managed to get this far! ...
Josu Sanz
@josusanz.bsky.social

Been using it for a while now. If you haven't tried AVIF yet, even smaller files in most cases. Though browser support for WebP is basically universal at this point so it's the safe default.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I just exported 69 slides from Keynote - as (reduced quality) JPG: 10.4MB, as PNG: 100MB, as WebP: 4.1MB Quality looks great, this 1920×1080 image here is 58KB

Eugene Meidinger
@sqlgene.com

One or two years ago I install a save as PNG browser extension because I was so annoyed with them. I think support has gotten better.

Ian Bicking
@ianbicking.org

WebP also has a straight-up lossless encodings that beat png (not by 25x, but maybe 25% improvement?) And then there's the newcomer on the block, AVIF, which adds another 20%ish on top of that for photos.

Nelson
@nelson.somebits.com

Do you find AVIF support is ubiquitous enough to use it? Last I looked it wasn't but it was awhile ago. I still run into places that don't really support WebP right either but it's better than it used to be. I use the weird JPEGs with a gain map for HDR right now.

bjkeefe
@bjkeefe.bsky.social

Interesting responses. I hesitated to use WEBP in things like email attachments and my own blog and website for a long while, b/c support seemed so hit or miss. And now that it seems, finally, to be universally supported, it is scorned!

Aleksi
@allexsen.dev

One of the biggest downsides of webp is that there are plenty of apps that doesn't accept it.. makes working with them quite painful

Reid Marlow
@reidmarlow.com

The delivery side is fantastic, but the friction moved downstream to desktop tooling. Web assets stay tiny, right up until someone downloads the file and discovers their local markdown editor or previewer still chokes on `.webp` without an ImageMagick pass first.

Gillian de Nooijer
@gilliandn.bsky.social

Actually I very much dislike Webp, although tis better than the horrible HEIF/HEIC thing Apple tried to push. But they are already looking into a new standard: JPEG XL is going to be the next thing, if they get through the corporate lobby.

Struan
@skiing.bsky.social

In case you don’t know already, Jake Archibald created a great tool squoosh.app. I use the cli to compress Apple screenshots from png to webp and the difference is pretty big.