WebP support

WebP is an image format employing both lossy and lossless compression, typically producing smaller files than JPEG or PNG at comparable quality. easy-thumbnails can generate WebP thumbnails natively, without any extra configuration beyond a couple of settings.

Generating WebP thumbnails

The output format is chosen from the thumbnail’s file extension. To make WebP the default output format project-wide, set THUMBNAIL_EXTENSION:

THUMBNAIL_EXTENSION = 'webp'

If you only want to convert some sources to WebP (e.g. keep JPEG sources as JPEG but re-encode PNGs losslessly), leave THUMBNAIL_EXTENSION at its default and use THUMBNAIL_PRESERVE_EXTENSIONS instead:

THUMBNAIL_PRESERVE_EXTENSIONS = ['webp']

This preserves WebP sources as WebP thumbnails while other formats still fall back to THUMBNAIL_EXTENSION.

Encoder options

WebP save options (such as quality or method) are configured via THUMBNAIL_IMAGE_SAVE_OPTIONS, which already ships a default entry:

THUMBNAIL_IMAGE_SAVE_OPTIONS = {
    'WEBP': {
        'quality': 85,
    },
}

Any keyword accepted by Pillow’s WebP plugin (e.g. lossless, method) can be added here.

Browser support

All current browsers support WebP in <img> tags, so no fallback markup (such as a <picture> element with a JPEG/PNG <source>) is required.