Adjust, open, save WebP images via the GIMP plugin GIMP-webp (PPA available)

WebP is a relatively new image format embracing a both lossy and lossless compression approach, file format developed by Google similarly to video format WebM.

Among its qualities, a presumable (according to various developers across the internets) smaller size for images bearing the same (or almost the same) quality, consequently, being created, designed and launched as a competitor for the JPEG image file format.

WebP is natively supported (on Ubuntu) by Chromium/Chrome and Opera, meaning, dragging&dropping a WEBP image into the mentioned web-browsers, opens it, allowing users to see the image.

By default, WEBP images are not supported by image-focused applications, such as Eye of GNOME (Ubuntu's default image viewer), GIMP, Pinta, MyPaint, etc.

GIMP-webp is a handy GIMP plugin that allows GIMP to open WEBP images, handling them just as any image file formats, furthermore, bringing numerous tweaking functionalities for the WEBP images, as well as export (save as) support.

GIMP-webp has just been updated to version 0.2, continuing its road towards a solid fully-usable plugin.

The new 0.2 version adds support for lossless WEBP images, as well the ability to read and write images with alpha channels.

GIMP-webp 0.2 allows the user to easily customize the WEBP images with Preset filters, such as Picture, Photo, Drawing, Icon, Text, etc, basically, the option to select predefined parameters that are to be applied to the about-to-be-created image.

Gimp-webp features multiple use cases, like for instance, directly opening a WEBP image and export it as PNG, and/or opening a PNG image and save it as WEBP, a viceversa full image file type handling experience.

In order to save a PNG image to WEBP file format, navigate to (after opening the PNG image with GIMP) GIMP-->File-->Export-->Select File Type (By Extension)-->WebP image, action followed by selecting a preset

and clicking Save.

How do we install GIMP-webp 0.2?
Add the following official PPA (Natty, Oneiric, Precise, Quantal)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:george-edison55/webp

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp-webp

Gimp-webp 0.2 is usable under both GIMP 2.6 (available via Ubuntu Software Center) and GIMP 2.8.