Compress WebP images in your browser

It uses a more modern compression method with better prediction and entropy coding, so it holds detail at bitrates where JPEG starts to break down.

Every browser released in the last several years does, Safari included.

Not on a still image. Re-encoding runs through a canvas that flattens onto white, so transparent areas become white, and you should keep the original if you need the alpha channel. An animated file is different: the animation path never flattens onto anything, so its transparency comes through.

WebP is an image format Google published in 2010 as a replacement for JPEG, PNG and GIF. It supports transparency like PNG, animation like GIF, and stores photographs more compactly than JPEG, though the often-quoted 25 to 35% is measured against a 2010-era JPEG encoder and the gap against a modern one is much smaller. Every current browser displays it, which is why most sites now serve it.

Three that matter in practice. Older desktop software and some email clients still will not open one, so WebP is a poor choice for a file you are sending to a person rather than putting on a page. Re-encoding a lossy WebP loses a little more each time, exactly as JPG does. And editor support for animated WebP is thinner than for GIF, even though the format itself is much better at it. On the web, where every current browser reads WebP, none of the three apply.

WebP for anything going on the web: it is smaller at the same quality and handles transparency. JPG when the file has to open in older software, or when someone will import it into a tool that still refuses WebP.

It stays animated. Every frame is decoded, re-encoded at the quality you pick and written back with its own duration and the original loop count. Each frame after the first is stored as only the rectangle that changed since the last one, which on anything with a still background is where most of the saving comes from.

Yes. Drop a GIF here and it comes back as an animated WebP with the frames and the timing intact, typically 30 to 50% smaller than the GIF. That is the single biggest saving available on a GIF, because WebP is not stuck with a palette of 256 colours per frame.

Yes, every time, and there is no way to turn it off. The image is decoded to pixels and encoded again from those pixels alone, so EXIF and GPS, the XMP packet, embedded colour profiles, and any Content Credentials or AI-generation tags the file arrived with do not survive. There is no switch for this, because there is no way to keep them. What no compressor can remove is a watermark written into the pixels themselves, such as the invisible marks some image generators add: those survive re-encoding here and everywhere else.