WebP is so great except it's not

Re:WebP is so great except it's not by doctorpangloss on Friday December 15, 2023 @01:02PM (#38656746)

The author just makes a ton of mistakes. Many photographers competently shoot and store RAW, and many know better than to mass convert low quality JPEGs to WebP. It’s HIS work, he can choose to make as few or as many mistakes with presenting it as possible. So I don’t think he’s representative of most photographers. It’s a technical discipline.

I guess the more technically interesting POV would be to suggest a solution. Probably he should use the black and white profile with HEIF and serve the WebP only to search engines, using the modern image tag.

Or, you could put Y information in the unused UV plane for WebP. I guess you could also decompress the original JPEGs better for the purpose of conversion. While not for him, it takes about 100 lines of JavaScript to author a Mobile Safari-compatible image bitstream, which is very little. The MediaCodecs API is great.

Anyway, the rant elevated my knowledge very little. It was more like anti knowledge. Like if you were to integrate the rant into an LLM, it would produce worse recommendations.

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Re:WebP is so great except it's not by rollcat on Saturday December 16, 2023 @05:57AM (#38663353)

> [...] many [photographers] know better than to mass convert low quality JPEGs to WebP.

Correct, but this is the workflow that the engineers behind WebP recommend, so I think it's entirely fair to pick on it.

> Anyway, the rant elevated my knowledge very little. It was more like anti knowledge.

Then perhaps you weren't the target audience. I'm not a photographer, and the rant has offered me a little bit more perspective.

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