The Google-developed WebP image formatting tool has long been a top choice for web image compression. Now, designers and photographers can more easily export and save Photoshop documents in the WebP file format – and there are many design & SEO benefits for doing so!

Photoshop 23.2 now fully supports the export of 8-bit RGB Photoshop documents to WebP, which allows for compression of both lossy and lossless images. In other words, WebP files can now be opened, created, edited, and saved in Photoshop, without requiring a preference setting or plug-in.

This is important because images are a major part of a website’s SEO status. Users on slower connections may have difficulty interacting with a website when the images aren’t properly compressed – and that can kill your traffic and conversion rates.

What are WebP Image Files?

WebP, a modern image format, has been around a while – since about 2010. Web developers and webmasters at Go Media and other firms prefer WebP because it allows us to create images that are both rich and small, ultimately making the website more responsive and faster.

A WebP lossless image is about 25 percent smaller than a PNG file and anywhere from 25-34 percent smaller than a JPEG, despite having roughly the same SSIM quality index. Users get transparency (or alpha channel) from lossless WebP images, for about 22 percent more bytes.

The ultimate goal is compiling lots of smaller components to create a single, large deliverable: A website that is extremely fast, lightweight, looks amazing, and reads on any device.

Files from WebP are natively supported by the following browsers for desktop and mobile devices:

• Google Chrome
• Safari
• Firefox
• Edge
• Opera

They’re also supported by other software libraries and tools, with developers having added support to a number of other image editing tools. The WebP format also includes lightweight encoding and decoding, as well as command tools for converting images – and even animating them.

Users can also convert collections of JPEGs and PNGs by downloading the cwebp conversion tool, which is precompiled for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

How Can I Access WebP in Photoshop?

To open a WebP file, select and open the image file the same way you would any other supported document or file. After you’ve made your edits, you click “Save a Copy,” and then select WebP from the list of menu options provided in the file format drop-down. In cases where there isn’t a risk of data loss or file overwrite, you can access WebP under “Save As.”

In Photoshop 23.1, you will need to download and install the WebPShop plug-in directly from Google. (You can also get it from GitHub if you have an Apache 2.0 license.)

You can also install the downloaded plug-in from Shared Creative Cloud Location, Windows, and macOS.