6 hours ago6 hr Activity feed is working again!Notifications are working too! Edited 6 hours ago6 hr by Matt!
3 hours ago3 hr 23 minutes ago, Minerva13 said:Hello.Now photos are not downloaded in the format jpgthey are only WEBP Yes, our bandwidth bill is thousands a month, we have enabled some flags on our CDN provider to serve WEBP like the rest of the modern web.
2 hours ago2 hr 55 minutes ago, Minerva13 said:Hello.Now photos are not downloaded in the format jpgthey are only WEBP WEBP is the better format for normal web use anyway. You get basically the same image quality without wasting as much bandwidth, so this change makes sense. I’ve posted a lot of photos here in the 15–20 MB range (sorry @maddog107 ), and I honestly can’t tell the difference in quality when converting them from JPG to WEBP.Question, out of curiosity: why is this post still in JPG format? https://www.bellazon.com/main/topic/52430-eiza-gonzalez/page/50/#findComment-6157514EDIT: they’re definitely compressed, since the original files were in the 10–20 MB range. Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by Matt!
2 hours ago2 hr Is this forever now? I can no longer download the photos I need from the website to my computer in jpg version?
2 hours ago2 hr Now, to download a photo, I can only take a screenshot. When I download a WEBP I don't see the photo, only the browser shortcut.
2 hours ago2 hr I've been thinking about this quite a bit. I'm not entirely convinced WEBP is truly the better format for normal web use. I know a few web admins / power users that are not happy with the perceived WEBP image quality for photos of people, especially closeups of faces, hands, and other skin. Compression can definitely be worse for smaller files. And there are some major compatibility concerns for old farts. I think it's telling that Meta (FB/IG), X, Pinterest, Shopify and so on are not broadly enforcing WEBP, though most do support it nowadays. Large JPEG can be compressed into smaller JPEGs (I don't think people can tell the difference between q=100 and q=90 or even q=80), and anything superfluous can reasonably be stripped anyway. In fact, sounds like unreasonably large picture files are the problem, not necessarily JPEGs themselves.
2 hours ago2 hr 12 minutes ago, Minerva13 said:Now, to download a photo, I can only take a screenshot. When I download a WEBP I don't see the photo, only the browser shortcut.What OS are you using? I assume you can simply use:https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pg2dk419drg?hl=en-US&gl=USIf you dont alreayd have it installed. Windows should have native webp support since windows 10+. You can right click and say open with "photos" or whatever you normally use to view jpegs and it should work just the same.
1 hour ago1 hr @maddog107 can you explain what happened here? From the before and after files, it looks like only one of the photos was compressed into WebP?
1 hour ago1 hr 2 minutes ago, zorzabosti said:I've been thinking about this quite a bit. I'm not entirely convinced WEBP is truly the better format for normal web use. I know a few web admins / power users that are not happy perceived WEBP image quality for photos of people, especially closeups of faces, hands, and other skin. Compression can definitely be worse for smaller files. And there are some major compatibility concerns for old farts. I think it's telling that Meta (FB/IG), X, Pinterest, Shopify and so on are not broadly enforcing WEBP, though most do support it nowadays. Large JPEG can be compressed into smaller JPEGs (I don't think people can tell the difference between q=100 and q=90 or even q=80), and anything superfluous can reasonably be stripped anyway. In fact, sounds like unreasonably large picture files are the problem, not necessarily JPEGs themselves.Instagram switched to webp in 2021. We are 5 years behind the "major" players. Support is not an issue at all. https://caniuse.com/webpAll green except for IE11 which if you are still using, im sure 99% of the websites out there dont even render correctly anymore. Compressions settings are equivalent to jpeg, I can adjust them up and down as needed, if you can show me a case where the webp is worse than the jpeg ill adjust my compression settings sitewide. Here is a summary of our findings during 2026 that shows that even on small images there is signifcant savings with imperceivable image loss:2026 Q1 (Jan-Mar) — 440,646 modern photos, 133.7 GB → 60.3 GB (55% saved) - Thumbnails (< 50 KB): 247K files, 19 KB → 11 KB avg, 42% saved - Small (50-100 KB): 18K files, 76 KB → 30 KB avg, 61% saved - Medium (100-200 KB): 38K files, 149 KB → 72 KB avg, 52% saved - Large (200-500 KB): 72K files, 326 KB → 169 KB avg, 48% saved - XL (500 KB - 1 MB): 36K files, 703 KB → 366 KB avg, 48% saved - XXL (> 1 MB): 30K files, 2.7 MB → 1.1 MB avg, 60% saved Only 659 out of 440K files (0.15%) were skipped because WebP was larger. Every size bucket benefits.
1 hour ago1 hr 10 minutes ago, Matt! said:@maddog107 can you explain what happened here? From the before and after files, it looks like only one of the photos was compressed into WebP?Most likely during the whole machine rebooting a million times and packages missing. I will go through and manually fix those up at a later time.
1 hour ago1 hr 3 minutes ago, maddog107 said:Most likely during the whole machine rebooting a million times and packages missing. I will go through and manually fix those up at a later time.I checked a bunch of posts, and it seems to mostly affect the larger files. Could there be some kind of size threshold where, once a file gets large enough, the compression/conversion step gets skipped or fails? Something around 10 MBish, maybe?
1 hour ago1 hr 5 minutes ago, maddog107 said:Instagram switched to webp in 2021. We are 5 years behind the "major" players. Support is not an issue at all.https://caniuse.com/webpAll green except for IE11 which if you are still using, im sure 99% of the websites out there dont even render correctly anymore.Compressions settings are equivalent to jpeg, I can adjust them up and down as needed, if you can show me a case where the webp is worse than the jpeg ill adjust my compression settings sitewide.Here is a summary of our findings during 2026 that shows that even on small images there is signifcant savings with imperceivable image loss:2026 Q1 (Jan-Mar) — 440,646 modern photos, 133.7 GB → 60.3 GB (55% saved) - Thumbnails (< 50 KB): 247K files, 19 KB → 11 KB avg, 42% saved - Small (50-100 KB): 18K files, 76 KB → 30 KB avg, 61% saved - Medium (100-200 KB): 38K files, 149 KB → 72 KB avg, 52% saved - Large (200-500 KB): 72K files, 326 KB → 169 KB avg, 48% saved - XL (500 KB - 1 MB): 36K files, 703 KB → 366 KB avg, 48% saved - XXL (> 1 MB): 30K files, 2.7 MB → 1.1 MB avg, 60% saved Only 659 out of 440K files (0.15%) were skipped because WebP was larger. Every size bucket benefits. Thanks for the reply.Yes, IG and FB support WEBP, but they are still serving JPEGs to me, not converting all media to WEBP is what I meant to say. In fact, video post thumbnails/(called "poster" in HTML) can be absolutely huge JPEGs.Most Every modern browsers supports WEBP, but local systems and pipelines may not. I suppose that problem is not really on Bellazon. It hurts user-friendliness/compatibility for some power users.I think I'll go test a few JPEGs and convert them to WEBP locally. Perhaps it's not as bad as my buddies are telling me. I do wonder why, say, Instagram is currently not actively converting all pictures then...
1 hour ago1 hr 28 minutes ago, zorzabosti said:Thanks for the reply.Yes, IG and FB support WEBP, but they are still serving JPEGs to me, not converting all media to WEBP is what I meant to say. In fact, video post thumbnails/(called "poster" in HTML) can be absolutely huge JPEGs.Most Every modern browsers supports WEBP, but local systems and pipelines may not. I suppose that problem is not really on Bellazon. It hurts user-friendliness/compatibility for some power users.I think I'll go test a few JPEGs and convert them to WEBP locally. Perhaps it's not as bad as my buddies are telling me. I do wonder why, say, Instagram is currently not actively converting all pictures then...You can try https://storage.googleapis.com/downloads.webmproject.org/releases/webp/WebpCodecSetup.exeon windows 8. According too the internet that should enable webp support in your filesystem on older windows machines.
1 hour ago1 hr 37 minutes ago, Matt! said:I checked a bunch of posts, and it seems to mostly affect the larger files. Could there be some kind of size threshold where, once a file gets large enough, the compression/conversion step gets skipped or fails? Something around 10 MBish, maybe?Just tried a 32mb image. Looks like it worked ok, i still think its most likely the timing of the post. If you retry today, let me know if you see any issues and ill investigate furthur.
59 minutes ago59 min 1 minute ago, maddog107 said:Just tried a 32mb image. Looks like it worked ok, i still think its most likely the timing of the post. If you retry today, let me know if you see any issues and ill investigate furthur.What do you mean it worked? It's still a 33.5MB PNG file? I’d love to try a 12 → 2 MB spread in 2 MB steps to see if that helps identify a possible thresholdcat.mp4 Edited 42 minutes ago42 min by Matt!
9 minutes ago9 min 51 minutes ago, zorzabosti said:I think I'll go test a few JPEGs and convert them to WEBP locally. Perhaps it's not as bad as my buddies are telling me. I do wonder why, say, Instagram is currently not actively converting all pictures then...In my local test, WEBP are indeed consistently smaller. Zoomed in, I can reliably tell which of two pictures is the JPEG and which is the WEBP. Give me one random picture, and I can't tell which format it is from the observed quality alone. Maybe the stories I've heard are mostly old and/or exaggerated. Meta could have their own wild reasons for not using WEBP site-wide; I've seen both .webp and .heic files served to me as JPEG by Meta.21 minutes ago, maddog107 said:You can try https://storage.googleapis.com/downloads.webmproject.org/releases/webp/WebpCodecSetup.exeon windows 8. According too the internet that should enable webp support in your filesystem on older windows machines.Thanks. At risk of sounding completely insufferable, I'm using Linux... It's the local tools and scripts that don't fully support WEBP.I'm not trying to be difficult, it's just that I autistically love the idea of preserving quality. Awfully idealistic. TBF, BZ has always been re-compressing JPEGs since before I joined. Most members will simply not notice or care. Most importantly, realistically, and certainly not care enough to pay for the difference in bandwidth or storage.
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.