GIMP Version: 2.8.10
Operating System: Linux
GIMP Experience: Advanced Level

List any relevant plug-ins or scripts:
GMIC

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Animated gif has a pallet of 8 bit (256) colors. WebP on the other hand has 24 bit color and 8 bit alpha channels. I would like to export some animations as webp so that they look a lot better. However, GIMP does not seem to have webp export support. I found some plugins from 2012 in the registry, but these do not support animation. Are there any alternatives?

Current support: WebP image format.

Too much room for abuse with flash, not to mention the security issues.

MNG never caught on and APNG creates really big files.

It's impressive that WebP can compress 24bit color images that can be 20% smaller (or less) than GIFs. I have read some criticisms regarding the quality of the animations, though. It's said they can be kinda blurry.

Perhaps a better question here might be....

Can GIMP export all layers as individual PNG's something like:

layer001.png
layer002.png
...
layer100.png

So that they can be stitched into an animated WebP file from another method?

The reason I'm so excited about animated WebP is that Chrome is used 40% across all platforms today and it's very easy to serve lower quality animated gif's to browsers that do not support WebP as a fallback.

Check out GIMP GAP (GIMP Animation Plug-in).

Source Code

Your Linux software repository might contain GAP pre-compiled for your distro.

64Bit Linux Binary in this thread.

Also, this thread on compiling GAP might help.

Going to be trying this out today to make some HQ WebP !!

>Yes, WebP has a support for animation. You can create animated WebP images using the WebPMux library/binary as follows:
(Make sure you have the 'cwebp' and 'webpmux' binaries).

(1) Convert all the JPEG images to WebP using the 'cwebp' binary. e.g.

for file in *.jpg; do cwebp ${file} -o ${file%.jpg}.webp; done

(2) Now, create an animated WebP image, from multiple WebP images created in step 1, using 'webpmux' binary.
For example, suppose you want to create an animation from 1.webp, 2.webp, 3.webp & 4.webp where
- Duration (in milliseconds) between frames is 60ms.
- Animation loops 1000 times
- Each frame has image offset (0,0) [that is, the top left pixel of each frame is located at (0,0)].
You can use the following command to achieve this:

webpmux -frame 1.webp +60+0+0 -frame 2.webp +60+0+0 -frame 3.webp +60+0+0 -frame 4.webp +60+0+0 -loop 1000 -o animation.webp

The quality of webp over gif is just amazing.... check out this sample I made (same source png's used in both)

WebP example:


GIF example:

Hi, how do I avoid naming every single frame ? I have about 50 of them in a folder.
Thanks.

Word of caution: this thread was started in 2014, so, 9 years later, Gimp has evolved quite a bit and will do WebP animations.

In Gimp, you can use "File > Open as layers" and select all the files in the folder at once to load the frames as layers, and then export the image as Webp, ticking the "As Animation" option.