Reply To: WEBP Images

[Kate LauterbachParticipant]

WEBP is a modern format that has great compression. One of the great advantages is that it allows us to compress the image data, but leave the alpha layer uncompressed. A transparent image in this format is usually smaller than the JPG that comes off of the camera, but has equal quality.

We’re running into two primary issues which has sent us this direction:

• All of our data is stored in the cloud, but our team builders work with the images locally, so they need to download all of the images to build a team. They’re building hundreds of teams, so the download process is rather slow for them. We also have a user building teams on a Mac M1 Max and once the images go over 30mb per image her computer really starts slowing down.
• The other issue is storage. In most cases we’re storing three versions of a file (original JPG, cutout PNG, and a color correction layer that’s also PNG). Just for March we’re currently pushing 10 terabytes when only considering the cutout PNG and correction PNG. We’re currently migrating all of these images to WEBP. If the software supported this format it would be ideal. Without support we’ll need to convert these on the fly back to PNG which will be pretty resource intensive.

Thank you for listening and for your consideration to add tis format!