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That’s not how conversion works.
Honestly this does sound like some goofy Windows feature lol
You can ‘change’ the extension of any file whose innards match the file type you’re ‘changing’ it to.
Under the hood, nothing changes. Windows opens it anyway because it reads the actual file data and basically assumes you must be an idiot.
e: change the file extension of a jpg to txt. Windows shrugs and says okay, if that’s what you really want, and shows you the code. Knock yourself out, it says, I’ll show you what I can, but it doesn’t convert the file.
Sorry -- I know all of that, yes. I'm just saying it wouldn't surprise me if in the future they tried to make it so changing extension changed the format too lol
But it does work, so....
No it doesn’t.
This may be hard to understand if you don’t know how it works, but nothing is being converted. It’s like opening a .docx in a .txt editor. It will show you the data it can, and there’s lots of crossover in image formats.
Sorry, I can’t explain it better without getting more technical than you can probably understand, but it’s not converting anything.
I know it doesn't convert, lol. It's a loophole to get around places that don't accept webp as an extension. It still reads it just fine. Thanks for the condescending attitude though, it made me laugh.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be condescending. Glad it made you laugh, tho.
I’m only trying to educate because most people seem to think everything should be a jpg or think it’s all magic (this thread is full of that), and this is one of the few topics I know quite a lot about.
Didn’t mean to offend.
e: rereading my last comment, I see what you mean. What I meant was it takes understanding of several scientific papers detailing the algorithms (which took me a bit to understand), and I can’t easily condense that into a comment online. Sorry for how that came across.
No problem, you're still a 100x better than most of reddit. I realize that I wasn't changing the file type, it's just that some sites don't accept webp. It doesn't make a visual difference so I don't really care and change it. You're right in that I don't know what it actually does though and why some sites don't want them.
I don’t miss Reddit. XD
You shouldn’t have to care, honestly. It should just work.
I had to learn all this because I was chief designer for one of the main companies that came up with these formats, but nobody else should have to care about this shit. The fact that this is a post in 2023* makes me feel like we’ve failed.
You shouldn’t even have to think about this.
Isn't that a marketing problem? You can make the best format in the world but if no one knows about it. Cool job though.
No, everyone knows these formats, just not what they’re for. Like people use jpg for everything when they should be using png. Like in this entire discussion.
Right, still marketing.
Okay, inasmuch as everyone in this thread not understanding the difference between png and jpg is a marketing problem.
Instead of thinking it’s a user issue, it should be up to developers to make sure the user doesn’t have to care. I promise they won’t either way.
It’s a development problem.
e: extra word
I think you'll agree with me if I explain it. The issue isn't being able to download or have it not work, it's not knowing what it does or its best use. When I first saw it, I thought it was a way to control what people can save or not save from a website, like a sort of enforced drm for pics. I then realized I could change the extension and make it work in places where it wasn't suppose to work, so I didn't worry about it. So I had just enough energy to not trust it, but still not enough to figure it out what it is or why anyone uses it.
Right. We agree that’s a rather gruelling experience you shouldn’t have had to have in an ideal world.
I’m saying that’s a problem that can and should be solved by the technology itself. Future users shouldn’t even have to think about that, and I say that from the position of knowing far too much about it.
It’s absolutely exhausting, as a user, to have to keep that level of knowledge current every several years for decades, and there’s no reason we should have to anymore. The technology is advanced enough to take more burdens off its users.
Sorry for the rant, but the image format debate exemplifies this.
I think you're too deep in the woods on this, tbh. It's not just understanding all this, but trusting what everything is because there are so many ways for people that mess with your shit. From my perspective, it came out of nowhere when we've had only a few extensions really used, for decades, in the pics department. Now video, if extensions change, I check them out right away because it changes more frequently.
Perhaps. This isn’t the best forum for this, either.
Rule of thumb: save as png.
Maybe, I'm just trying to give you the every man perspective.