A small, short tutorial today: How to convert those darn .webp files into .jpg?
Motivation
If you, like me, periodically refresh your Zoom background to something fun and festive, you too may run into the dreaded new Internet image format: .webp. This is a Google-developed image format which is a bit more efficient in compressing images for the Web, with less quality loss. Unfortunately, while they load in a webpage fine, my Preview app was not recognizing them. What's a saving-images-from-the-Internet-person to do?
Example and 2 okay solutions
Consider this image, from r/ZoomBackgrounds: image link
If you right-click and Save Image As..., your only option is to save it as a WebP Image. While this YouTube video shows how you can trim everything after jpg? from the URL, this may not work. If you try it on the above link, you'll get a 403 Forbidden.
Another solution, which did work for me, but felt very 2003 "I have no idea how to computer", was this dodgy website which lets you upload your .webp files and re-download them as .jpgs. I won't bother linking, you can Google/DuckDuckGo that yourself. Since I have no idea what chicanery is happening behind the scenes of such a website.
Best solution: The command line!
DuckDuckGo-ing "webp jpg command line" delivered me unto the Google docs, and, lo, there is a simple, Homebrew-installable command line utility that will do the converting for you.
brew install webp
dwebp calvin.webp -o calvin.jpg
Voila! That worked. Much easier. Much more transparent-feeling. Note that the webp Homebrew formula downloads several utilities:
cwebp: For encoding from.jpg->.webp. I guess if you're a web developer?dwebp: For decoding your Calvin & Hobbes backgrounds back to.jpg.
And other stuff, including one utility called webpmux, which the docs helpfully describe as a "WebP muxing tool". What in the world is muxing? (Apparently combining multiple analog/digital signals into one. Still have no idea what that means.)
Endnotes
Here's German 1920s-revival singer Max Raabe and German rapper Samy Deluxe singing one of my favorites, Der perfekte Moment. A true ode to laziness!
Happy zooming!