Ubuntu 22.10 To Ship With WebP Image Support Out-Of-The-Box

Prior to this past week's Ubuntu 22.10 feature freeze, webp-pixbuf-loader was promoted to the main archive for allowing WebP images to have thumbnail support within the GNOME desktop on this next Ubuntu release and being able to open up WebP image files within the GNOME image viewer and the like.

Sadly even with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS there hasn't been out-of-the-box support for WebP, the increasingly popular image format developed by Google that supports both lossy and lossless compression and can handle animations too. WebP is based on the infra-frame coding of the VP8 video format.

The webp-pixbuf-loader is the leading solution for WebP image file format support to GdkPixbuf loader. With webp-pixbuf-loader, GNOME's Nautilus file manager can display thumbnails for WebP images and it's needed for opening said images into the Eye of GNOME (EOG) image viewer or Shotwell.

Approved this week via this ticket was getting webp-pixbuf-loader into Ubuntu 22.10's main archive. With it now in main that October update to Ubuntu Linux will feature nice out-of-the-box WebP image support on the GNOME desktop.