Guide | Download .webp images from Web pages
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How to download .webp images from Web pages
Many Web pages are now using the .webp image format, which offers advantages over the traditional .jpg and .png. If dragged to Desktop or saved to disk using Save Image As… in contextual menu, the image is saved as .webp, which can't be opened in Preview (the image viewing and editing app that comes with macOS). (Double-click the image file, Preview opens but displays nothing.) Brave does the same, so I guess it's a Chromium feature; not surprising as .webp is a Google proprietary format.
You can download GIMP to open and convert the .webp image :), but I discovered a quicker method:
Place the cursor on the image in the webpage, control-click (right-click) for a contextual menu, and select Copy Image, which puts the image in the Clipboard.
Open Preview, select File: New from Clipboard ⌘N, and it does just that: creates a new image from the contents of the Clipboard, which you can then save as .png or .jpg.
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@Gwen-Dragon said in Guide | Download .webp images from Web pages:
Well, yes. But it looks complicated, maybe CLI? When I first ran into the problem some months back, I found various online utilities that'll do the conversion, e.g.: 3 Methods to Batch Convert WebP to JPG.
Or, of course, I can simply leave Vivaldi and open the Web page in Safari, which automatically converts the .webp image to .png when it's either downloaded or dragged to the Desktop (be nice if Vivaldi for Mac would do that).
But as I am trying to move to Vivaldi as my primary browser – and help others to do so – I figured a simple solution, which doesn't require downloading a huge app like GIMP or installing something arcane with Homebrew, is preferable.
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@Gwen-Dragon said in Guide | Download .webp images from Web pages:
Oh, sorry, i often forget that Mac users are often mouse-only.
Well, yeah, I guess if it wasn't for the Macintosh, you Windows folks would still be doing everything by keyboard. I also have an automobile with a starter motor on the engine, so I don't have to get it going with a hand crank.
Actually, I've been using trackballs and then trackpads since I got my first Mac Portable in 1990, hardly ever use a mouse.
I often run Linux and mostly Windows. there the tools are different.
Yes, I know. Never used Windows; it gives me the creeps. Planning to try Linux when I can get to it; after 33 years in the Mac environment, Apple's increasingly arrogant, stupid behavior is finally driving me away. (And I'm not alone.)
I use ffmpeg for conversion as i can type faster in commandline that start a extra progra with GUI.
I have very little experience with CLI – just an occasional chore in Terminal – but know I'm going to have to learn more as I get into Linux. A good skill to have, but making it a necessity is not appealing to the vast majority of computer users.
As far as the subject of this thread goes, since I have to convert the .webp images (because Vivaldi won't do it like Safari), the trick I discovered (on my own by experimentation) is convenient because I'm probably going to want to open the image in Preview anyway, say to adjust the size before placing it in a document.
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@Gwen-Dragon I came rather late to computers. When I was an office boy on Wall Street in the early 1960s, a computer occupied an entire floor of a high-rise building, and was operated using punch cards. That was about all I knew, and all I wanted to know, as it was clear even then that computers would be a major tool in the creation of the Nineteen Eighty-Four panopticon world which has now been largely realized.
I got into publishing and graphic work (e.g. the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s), and by the late 1980s it was clear that the field was becoming computerized, so I figured I had better learn about it. (Actually, it was an article in Whole Earth Review in late 1987 about how computers made it possible to "type" in Chinese that finally spurred me to take a look.)
I went to the local community college and took a course, where they showed us how to turn on a computer, load DOS and WordPerfect. I thought, I can learn this if I have to. Then I saw a note in the newspaper about somebody doing a demo on the Macintosh computer (which I'd heard of but knew nothing about) at the public library. I went, and frankly fell in love with the GUI – especially icons, which I quickly learned how to modify and create once I got my first computer, a Mac Plus, the following Spring.
And I've been in the Macintosh world ever since, including ~15 years as a freelance Mac support consultant. Never seen a Xerox PARC machine or an Apple LISA, nor Amiga (though I understand it was pretty cool). Like I said, the few brief encounters I've had with Windows have given me the creeps. But now that Apple has turned into the very Big Brother it so famously mocked in the first Mac commercial in 1984 – and its products, while still shiny and clever, are becoming more and more buggy – it's no longer significantly different in character from Microsoft. Which is too bad, but the way of this world.
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@Gwen-Dragon Yes, Apple's products have always been grossly overpriced. Maybe the pricing was justified in the early years of the Mac by the tremendous costs involved in creating such revolutionary technology, but in recent times they only get away with it because nobody else has been willing to put in the work to compete on Apple's level. So they have a captive audience.
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With Vivaldi you don't need a mac, OpenBSD, FreeBSD or any extension.
- Just hover Over the image
- Rt Click, or however you get the context menu
- use Image Properties (the image will open in a New Tab)
- Again hover over the image, get the context menu and Copy Image
- open your favourite image manipulation program (IrfanView is a good one and works well with Wine on Linux)
- Create a new (empty) image and Paste
I believe many programmes have hundreds of formats you can Save As...
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Ppafflick moved this topic from Vivaldi for macOS on
