(This is my first post sent from Sync, so hopefully I don’t mess this up too badly…)

This might already exist, or might just generally be a stupid idea, but here we go:

I share images from Lemmy / Sync pretty frequently, primarily as direct images to Facebook Messenger. However, Messenger doesn’t like WEBP files, and quite a few instances seem to be using WEBP instead of JPEG or PNG.

It’d be a time-saver (literally minutes a day!) and reduction of friction if there was an option to convert WEBP to JPEG on-the-fly when sharing. Right now I have to check the image format, and if it’s a WEBP I need to download and edit / re-save before sharing.

I was going to say this would be a nice value-add for Ultra, but I’m already subscribed 🤷🏻‍♂️

I bet this issue doesn’t actually affect that many users (stupid North America and its reliance on Facebook Messenger), but it does ever so slightly annoy me, so I figured might as well shoot my shot and make a feature request.

It’s annoying enough that if Sync was OSS I would have submitted a PR already.

All that said: Sync is great and I’m so happy it was transposed from Reddit.

  • regalia@literature.cafeEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    The entire point of webp is compression for the web, it’s literally in the name. It compresses much better then jpeg, which is the point of why it was created. All modern image viewers can handle webp just fine.

    • MrGG@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      I know what WEBP is, why it is used, and why some instances would prefer to use it. But sharing WEBP to Facebook Messenger does not work, it returns an error.

        • MrGG@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Haha I was sort of anticipating that too. I actually do use Signal, and wish more of my friends / family would too, but I don’t have the time nor the energy to try and convince all of them to switch away from Messenger.

          Meta IS evil, but they don’t have my real name and I try to block as much of their tracking as possible. An unfortunate requisite evil right now if I want to easily keep in contact with people.

        • MrGG@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          Oh you 😂 you think I should ask the multinational behemoth social media company (that is routinely antagonistic towards the laws of other countries, and rejects feature requests from users for sport) to support WEBP as a shareable format in their messenging app, rather than the very receptive developer of a small app that I directly support through my subscription?

          You have contact info for the team I should be talking to at Facebook?

    • GarrettBird@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      In the telegram app, webp is counted as a ‘sticker’, which will cause it to be rendered at a fixed scale, and you will be unable to zoom in on it. Stickers in telegram are used as reaction images that can be put into their own folders.

      So if I share a webp image in telegram, you pretty much wont be able to read or see what’s going on due to the fixed scale.

      • MrGG@lemmy.caOPEnglish
        10·
        1 year ago

        Oof. I guess that’s slightly better than what happens with Facebook Messenger, which is a generic “an error has occurred” dialogue box.

    • Pasta Dental@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      For sending as a message attachment, compression is not nearly as needed since the image is only distributed to one or two people and it’s only one image, so the webp could be transcoded directly to jpeg to have the same quality and the difference wouldn’t be much, I think OPs idea is kinda good