Support webp format for image upload

[icncsx]

Issue

webp is a popular image format originally developed by Google. I get an "Image has an unsupported type" error when I try to upload a webp image.

Is this something we can possibly support?

[rhymes]

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[subodhk01]

@icncsx Can you describe where exactly you are trying to upload the image?

[rhymes]

@subodhk01 I guess the article uploader or the comment uploader, neither supports webp in input.

[icncsx]

@rhymes you got it!

[nickytonline]

The article image uploaders support it on the frontend. It's the backend that can't process it. See the accept="image/*" attribute.

[rhymes]

Even though I previously assigned myself here and created a draft PR #9156, I'm going to relinquish this as I think it's going to be addressed by us switching to imgproxy and that's the work that @maestromac and @jdoss have been doing. I don't think it's worth the effort to try to add WebP support to carrierwave.

Will imgproxy be webp-enabled @maestromac ?

[maestromac]

@rhymes Webp is supported on Imgproxy but we would still need to update Carrierwave too because it is the first recipient of the uploaded content, then it get modified/cached by Imgproxy.

[mstruve]

@vaidehijoshi I feel like this might need product sign off before deciding to support another upload type. What are your thoughts?

[vaidehijoshi]

@mstruve supporting webp is a very developer-specific route; looking at our current set of priorities and product statement, I would say that this is something we might be able to support within the broader forem ecosystem down the road, but I don't think we have the bandwidth to implement and maintain this right now

[rhymes]

A quick non empirical investigation: upload from phone works, that's because smartphones don't store images in webp and, at least for the iPhone, even if they store images in HEIC, they're smart enough to convert them to JPG pre-upload. I can't upload HEIC to Forem (verified by sending a photo taken from the iPhone to the desktop computer via Airdrop to avoid conversion).

I'm quite confident Android uses JPEG internally as well. So on the mobile front we're covered.

System level screenshots are usually in PNG and we support that. Photo editing apps usually export either in raw formats or in JPEG or PNGs. Photoshop for example, doesn't natively support WebP as a format, only through a plugin to be installed manually.

The only scenario where WebP upload is probably needed is when someone downloads an image that's already a WebP and wants to upload it to a Forem, which, again without any empirical data, it doesn't seem to happen very often (and it's one export/conversion away anyway).

Don't know of any other scenarios where WebP as an imported format might be required.

So yeah, we'll eventually need this but not right now.

[cmgorton]

@mstruve supporting webp is a very developer-specific route; looking at our current set of priorities and product statement, I would say that this is something we might be able to support within the broader forem ecosystem down the road, but I don't think we have the bandwidth to implement and maintain this right now

Given Vaidehi and Rhymes's response I am going to go a head and close this issue for now and we can revisit this kind of feature request in the future.

[joshuacortes]

WebP is required as a next gen format, when we will receive it?