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

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!

What a strange reaction. 😮 We process hundreds of photos for online web every day. The Webp format has a third smaller capacity than JPG, it is the standard, it speeds up the loading of pages and thus better placement of positions in Google. Tiff is completely out for online web output. I expected LR to be primarily a production tool and not a toy for creative photographers. It's sad that today I have to use a competing tool in addition to LR only for WEBP export.

Please make this as easy as selecting JPEG or TIFF on export!!!  🙂 

Thanks much!

@J453   In reply to your message 12 Jan 2017.

It is 2023 now. More than 6 years later. When can we expect Lr full WebP support?

I hope Lightroom has an exporting feature for WEBP format. It is required for most of us