A New Format for Lossless and Lossy Image Compression

Lossless webp images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNG. Lossy webp images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG. This package reads and writes webp images into a 3 (rgb) or 4 (rgba) channel bitmap array using conventions from the 'jpeg' and 'png' packages.

A New Format for Lossless and Lossy Image Compression

webp images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG. This package reads and writes webp images into a 3 (rgb) or 4 (rgba) channel bitmap array using conventions from the 'jpeg' and 'png' packages.

Hello World

# Convert to webp
library(png)
img <- readPNG(system.file("img", "Rlogo.png", package="png"))
write_webp(img, "rlogo.webp")
browseURL("rlogo.webp")
rm(img)
 
# Convert from webp
library(jpeg)
img <- read_webp("rlogo.webp")
writeJPEG(img, "rlogo.jpeg")
browseURL("rlogo.jpeg")

Installation

Binary packages for OS-X or Windows can be installed directly from CRAN:

install.packages("webp")

Installation from source on Linux or OSX requires libwebp. On Debian or Ubuntu install libwebp-dev:

sudo apt-get install -y libwebp-dev

On Fedora we need libwebp-devel:

sudo yum install libwebp-devel

On CentOS / RHEL we install libwebp-devel via EPEL:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install libwebp-devel

On OS-X use webp from Homebrew:

brew install webp