it's time to move to webp (mac instruction)

I've been blown away by the .webp image format - it makes such small file size images with very little visible loss, and even supports transparency and animations.

For a long time, webp was kind of the ugly stepchild of image formats - stuff would work on the web but most OSes treated it as some strange alien thing. That's slowly changing. (And on the DIY server side, older versions of ImageMagick wouldn't really deal with it.) It still doesn't fill quite native on Mac (e.g. support for marking it up in the Preview app) but close enough - it thumbnails fine.)

The filesize thing especially comes up with how a lot AI-powered image toys generate large PNGs. This ChatGPT image (compare to the original - it's really just a redraw of a striking photo done in a cartoony style) is a 2.1 MB png - or a 163 KB! 

If you're on a Mac, you can use Automator to make a right click menu "Quick Action" that can convert one or many files all at once right in Finder. (Automator feels a bit old and clunky, but most online resources point you to Automator)

First step: get the convertor. You can use homebrew to install "webp" (the actual installed commands are cwebp to convert, dwebp to deconvert, webpinfo, and webpmux) in Terminal.

So Automator is a bit janky (and it's annoying to have to dig into "Library" through finder to remove old Quick Actions) but once you start it up (using cmd-space or what not):

• create a new "Quick Action",
• filter or scroll down to "Run Shell Script" in the second column
• drag that over and it becomes the first (and only) step in the flow. 
• Set the workflow for "Image files", then in the step make sure to Pass input "as arguments", and then enter the following:

export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

for f in "$@"; do

  dir=$(dirname "$f")

  base=$(basename "$f")

  name="${base%.*}"

  cwebp -q 85 "$f" -o "$dir/$name.webp"

done

Vavavoom! Welcome to 2010!