If you are a lover of GIF images you may have already realized that they do not always use that format. Some of these moving images use the .WebP instead, we will explain how this WebP is and how it differs from the rest. And it is becoming increasingly popular and its presence continues to grow.
In summary, we could say that it is an open source image format that is being developed by Google. Its objective is to unify all the advantages of PNG, JPEG and GIF formats into a single one much lighter than any of the three. In this way, the websites you visit may be less heavy and will load faster.
What exactly is the WebP format?
The WebP is an image format that has been developed by Google for almost a decade. Its mission is to offer compressions with and without losses to unify the advantages of JPEG, PNG and GIF formats trying to minimize the size of the images that use it to try to make the web faster.
This is a project that Google presented in 2010, and that is open source under the BSD license. Its technology is based on the VP8 video format that Google acquired with the purchase of On2 Technologies in 2009. In addition to the WebP, Google is also developing another also open video format called WebM, although this format is somewhat heavier and does not have as much popularity.
We currently have three codecs or majority formats that everyone uses. They are JPEG, PNG and GIF, dating from 1991, 1996 and 1987 respectively. Since its birth, these formats have evolved to make them more or less continue to serve, but in some cases they begin to be a bit outdated, and this is one of the reasons why Google decided to start developing its own format.
Each of these three formats has its unique characteristics:
JPEG: It is characterized by its high compression capacity, although in return it has a significant loss of image quality.
PNG: It is a lossless format that supports transparency, but does not have such a powerful compression and makes the images especially heavy.
GIF: Its compression has no losses, but it can only represent 256 colors. Given that your screen represents millions of colors, the result is that GIF is possibly the most obsolete format of the three, although the only one that supports animations.
Therefore, the fact that Google wants to offer all the benefits of these three formats means that they have high JPEG compression on the one hand, on the other the ability to offer lossless images such as PNG, and finally the ability to reproduce images moving and lossless like GIFs. In all cases, WebP files are lighter.
Smaller than JPG and lighter than PNG? Google introduces WebP
Google has announced the launch of important news for its WebP image format. The company has managed to design a system that allows the compression of
Google has announced the launch of important news for its WebP image format. The company has managed to design a system that allows the compression of images without diminishing their quality. The company says that WebP offers an image size 28 percent smaller than with the PNG format, the most commonly used lossless compression system on the Web; and, of course, with more quality than the JPG.
The weight of the images has been a problem for users and web publishers, who on many occasions have had to sacrifice the quality of snapshots to obtain lighter images. Until now, JPG formats have been used mainly, which allows a great weight reduction, and PNG, which offered the best result in quality compression. However, Google has introduced improvements in its WebP system that promise to improve the result compared to its rivals.
According to the company, users can now use a WebP mode in which images are compressed without loss. To represent the advantages of this novelty, Google has analyzed the result of compressing store images in PNG and WebP, to check the resulting size of each image. In the comparison, WebP presents files 28.2 percent smaller than PNG images, with the same quality. In addition, according to Google, 99.4 percent of compressed images have presented better results in WebP than in PNG.
The ability to make images lighter with the same quality has important advantages for web administrators and users. For administrators, it is a simpler way to upload photos and not have problems with upload time or storage capacity. For users, the main advantage is that, despite weighing less, images should load sooner, so the waiting time on the websites will be shorter. With its study and the data presented, Google encourages users and web administrators to use the WebP system, which could become a new standard for online photographs.
