It's been a while since I last added an article to this site. So I thought I would write about a recent challenge I had.
The challenge was to convert many .jpg's, .gif's & .png's to .webp. Why webp? Well webp is an image format that supports lossy and lossless compression. It's great for the web & for speeding up page load times!
There are online tools to help you convert an image from other formats to webp. Unfortunately, a lot of these tools have limits and want to charge you. I found myself in a situation where I had to convert hundreds of images recently and decided to find the best solution to quickly convert folders full of images.
Google provide a tool to use which can convert the images for you.
- Visit Google's download page to see a list of downloads.
- Download the latest Windows version. At this time it is 'libwebp-1.2.1-windows-x64.zip'
- Extract the files to your C:\ drive so that you have a folder called c:\libwebp-1.2.1-windows-x64.
To convert an image is as easy as opening up Powershell (as an administrator) and running the command.
cwebp -q 80 image.png -o image.webp
If you have a folder full of images and don't want to have to do them one by one. Copy this script into your powershell and update the $imageFolder variable.
$imageFolder = "C:\my-website\my-images"
$images = Get-ChildItem $imageFolder
foreach ($img in $images) {
$outputName = $img.DirectoryName + "\" + $img.BaseName + ".webp"
C:\libwebp-1.2.1-windows-x64\bin\cwebp.exe $img.FullName -o $outputName
}
