Answer by Pablo Bianchi for How to add WebP support to Eye of GNOME?

2023-10-11 Update: There is a huge vulnerability on libwebp, CVE-2023-4863:

• https://www.magnetforensics.com/blog/how-to-detect-blastpass-inside-a-webp-file/
• https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2023-4863
• https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2023-4863

2023-12-01 Update: added built-in WebP support to GNOME Platform/SDK.

For Ubuntu 22.04

sudo apt install webp-pixbuf-loader

For Ubuntu 20.04

Follow these steps to add support for WebP to Eye of GNOME:

1. Prebuild

   sudo apt install git meson ninja-buildcd /tmp/git clone https://github.com/aruiz/webp-pixbuf-loadercd webp-pixbuf-loader/sudo ln -s /usr/lib/*/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders /usr/bin/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders  # https://github.com/aruiz/webp-pixbuf-loader/issues/9#issuecomment-537437407

2. Build on Debian/Ubuntu

   meson builddir -Dgdk_pixbuf_query_loaders_path=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/gdk-pixbuf-query-loadersninja -C builddir

3. Install

   sudo ninja -C builddir install

Test

wget -O /tmp/samplefile.webp "https://www.gstatic.com/webp/gallery/1.sm.webp"eog /tmp/samplefile.webp

Default app for .webp extension (image/webp internet media type)

From EOG issue eog.desktop doesn't include webp mimetype:

After installing https://github.com/aruiz/webp-pixbuf-loader eog loads webp images properly... but it is still not added as supported mime type to the .desktop file and, as a consequence, is not offered by default to open those images

To fix this:

# Get info                                        #   If you didn't go through above steps:wget -O /tmp/samplefile.webp "https://www.gstatic.com/webp/gallery/1.sm.webp"xdg-mime query filetype /tmp/samplefile.webp      # MIME type of the file: image/webpxdg-mime query default image/webp                 # .desktop filename of the application which is registered# Set open .webp with eogxdg-mime default org.gnome.eog.desktop image/webp # Ask the desktop environment to make application the default                                                  # application for opening files of type mimetype: Search on                                                  # ~/.local/share/applications/ (user-wide) or /usr/share/applications/ (system-wide).sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime         # Apply system-wide# Testxdg-open /tmp/samplefile.webp

Of course, change org.gnome.eog.desktop to whatever you want.

Ubuntu 22.10 ship WebP support out-of-the-box^[1]. For 22.04 you can use a PPA (if you trust in the developer).

See also

• Cannot open 90% of recently saved images (webp format)
• Which image-viewers in Linux support the `webp` image format?
• URL protocol handlers in basic Ubuntu Desktop
• The promissing format JPEG-XL/JXL is supported by ImageMagick's jpeg-xl
• Loupe, probably the EOG replacement.