I’ll admit that I haven’t heard anything about Google WebP until today when I was browsing the Internet. WebP is a recently created image format by Google which is designed to be both lossless and lossy.
If you read Google’s description of WebP, it makes fairly impressive claims over JPEG in terms of lossy compression, with about 25% smaller file sizes.
WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index.
I wanted to give this a quick test so I downloaded the WebP coverter source code from Google’s developer site and compiled it on my Mac OS X (10.9.x) box. Note that rather than install the Google binaries or using Macports like Google documents, I downloaded the source for libjpeg, libgif, libtiff, and libpng and compiled all of those by hand, then linked and compiled the WebP against those.
From there, I tested JPEG to WebP conversion using a sample photo I took back in 2011:
I took a 100% crop of the above photo and generated a 1200×1200 pixel ‘uncompressed’ JPEG (100% quality) and then converted that JPEG to WebP with 100% quality.
Comparison Page = https://www.ocabj.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/jpegwebp.html (opens in new window).
Note: I am providing the directly links below because WebP own’t display directly in Google Chrome in WordPress.
- 1200×1200 pixel 100% crop – JPEG (100% quality) – 1351793 bytes ~ 1,352 Kbytes
- 1200×1200 pixel 100% crop – WebP (100% quality, converted from JPEG) – 813608 bytes ~ 814 Kbytes – *For some reason, the link downloads the image. File download does open in Google Chrome, though. Possible WordPress issue.*
As far as I can tell, the detail the WebP file from the direct JPEG conversion looks really good at 60% the file size of the source file. It is evident that the colors did change, and I’m not exactly sure how WebP handles colorspace data, if at all.
But if Google can continue to advance the WebP image format further, I think this could offer us a nice alternative to JPEG. Although, WebP might be more likely to be adopted by web developers who need gains in core site images in PNG since the developers can afford to push the envelope in this area. Whereas digital photographers will want to stick with the tried and true JPEG, and won’t be willing to switch until WebP has proven itself.
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