P: Camera Raw/Lightroom Classic/Lightroom Ecosystem: Support for WebP

There's an apple in with them oranges. HEIC may have some compression, but it's basically huge (and it's the default on an iOS device, making for nice fat cloud accounts using lots of electricity, ahem). Among the compressed formats, WebP seems to be the best right now, and is widely adopted, so it would make sense for image-organizing software to support it.

This is not an ideal solution and may I join the chorus of people calling for Adobe to catch up with our needs?  If you have a WordPress website there are plugins that you can use that will automatically convert to webp. I have it running on my website: here is my corporate photography page with quite a few images, if you open on of the images and try to save it you will see that they are webp however I uploaded only jpg.   

'Adobe', there are so many alternatives coming to market now, you guys need to be on the front foot 😉 

What am I missing?  Does not Adobe Systems claim to be the world leader in digital image processing software?  Apparently, without using a lame plug-in like "anyfile", I have to go through all kinds of gyrations to import a very large percentage of photos in the known universe.

If this is true, everyone ever involved with Adobe Lightroom Classic needs to be fired.  Immediately.

Also, LRC absolutely SUCKS for video.  I want to dump Adobe LRC very much.

Thank you for the endless hours of extra work and frustration.  Please send me a product survey.

Part of the problem is that numerous formats have been put forward to replace JPEG, including PNG, WebP, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000, HIEC, and AVIF. Each has its merits but its still a horse race. WebP has been pushed by Google and HEIC is now the default image format for iOS so you have competing commercial interests. Compatability is all over the place, and while some devices (desktop computers, cell phones) can be easily updated, many others cannot.

I suspect that HEIC and AVIF will be the formats to win out but who knows.

Hi, I'm interested to know the benefits of webp?   Is the picture quality any better than jpeg and why use it, I'm keen to know?  I found this converter https://cloudconvert.com/jpg-to-webp if that helps at all.

The main benefit is that webp images have a significantly smaller file size compared to JPGs with the same compression and image quality. As a result, websites that use webp images load much faster in the browser.

There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of existing JPG-to-WEBP converters available on the internet, as well as in virtually all other leading image editing applications - including Photoshop itself. This forum thread doesn't exist because we're lacking the ability to convert images to webp - rather, it exists because we specifically need and want Lightroom itself to "catch up with the times" and support exporting images to webp natively.

Saving an image first to JPG, and then converting it to webp as a second step - eg. using an online converter - results in two instances of lossy compression, which degrades the image quality. It's always better to export natively to the target image format, directly from the source.

This post already is in the Ideas section of the forum. 🙂

The best thing we can all do is upvote this post (not the individual comments inside this post, but the post itself), and add our own comments here in support. Even though Adobe won't confirm if/when they're working on this feature, the more upvotes it has, the more likely Adobe will see it and consider it.

I'm also desperate to have support in Lightroom Classic for exporting to WebP. Literally every main browser supports it now, and it's the industry standard for web. Photoshop now has native support for saving as webp - so why not Lightroom?

This thread is just more proof that Adobe doesn't care about it's customers or actually improving it's products.  How is webp not yet supported? 

The thing that really annoys me about LrC is that it does not even recognise webP images. This means that I cannot index those items nor can I add them to a Collection. This disrupts my workflow. 

I love Lightroom.

Please add webP to the images you support.

Is there anybody out there? It is 2023 and webp format export still missing!