Convert Images Hosted by Google to WebP

WebP is one of the best thing that happened after Google acquired On2 in 2010. While WebM doesn't have a strong adoption outside YouTube and Firefox started to support H.264 after a few years of fight, WebP is an image format that's already used by many sites and applications. It can replace both JPEG and PNG and you can use it to create images that are compressed more efficiently (by about 35%) and look better. "By converting PNGs and JPEGs to WebP, the Chrome Web Store was able to reduce image sizes by about 30% on average," informs Google.

The format is supported by Chrome, Opera, Android 4.0+ and there are many tools that help you convert images to WebP and view them. It's also interesting to find that all the images hosted by Google services like Picasa Web, Blogger and Google+ can be converted to WebP using a simple URL adjustment.

Here's an example of JPEG photo hosted by Google+:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-b1qAbtG7VuI/TqON2f_eReI/AAAAAAAA4P4/r_5AKUt42rg/s633/DSC03146.JPG [57 KB]

To convert the photo to WebP, just replace "/s633/" with "/s633-rw/" ("/sNUMBER/" with "/sNUMBER-rw/") :

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-b1qAbtG7VuI/TqON2f_eReI/AAAAAAAA4P4/r_5AKUt42rg/s633-rw/DSC03146.JPG [33 KB]

I'll also include the URL of a PNG screenshot from the previous post:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicVfiEO2pa4LOGuuoRK_F6b2sy_oNSbjq2GJD6XIPSiCbbKcW9XS_vei2Dr73XDZ_P-abuK-ECWeM5JpQhbrck1KMqN9olbGl4MipMJ7xZ4-OaR8uZsEb6h0oiExJOV7-PdBmdpg/s640/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [21 KB]

Here's the WebP photo:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicVfiEO2pa4LOGuuoRK_F6b2sy_oNSbjq2GJD6XIPSiCbbKcW9XS_vei2Dr73XDZ_P-abuK-ECWeM5JpQhbrck1KMqN9olbGl4MipMJ7xZ4-OaR8uZsEb6h0oiExJOV7-PdBmdpg/s640-rw/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [14.5 KB]