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In the ubuntu files browser 'Files' I can set the default viewer for a given filetype (right-click->properties->open with) - but is there a way to get Files itself to show thumbnails for .webp images (which eg imagmagick, cv2 and gimp all seem to handle) ? It does this e.g. for .jpg with no problem.

2 Answers 2

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I tried this and it works on my Ubuntu. In Ubuntu 22.10 and later open the terminal and type:

sudo apt install webp-pixbuf-loader

I don't know if this is safe but basically what I did:

  1. Downloading a file/repository from PPA is downloading from someone or a group that we have no idea who it is or in other word the file is not maintained by official Ubuntu team. The author had written 120 articles, but I am a blind man in this area so there is no guarantee that the website has good governance or the file is maintained regularly by the author.

  2. Update the system so it will update the file to the newest version.

  3. Install the file/library.

There are other steps, but after I installed the library I could see all thumbnails of webp files, and I just stopped at step 3. We can see the other steps on the link. I put the link on the bottom.

This is how I did it.

Open the terminal and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:krifa75/eog-ordissimo
sudo apt update
sudo apt install webp-pixbuf-loader

Link: https://www.makeuseof.com/view-webp-images-on-ubuntu-linux-mint/

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  • I'm using this and can't imagine someone would use such a niche piece of software to create a trojan horse or whatever. it does what it claims it does and i don't think it'll do anything else. but just in case, i'm leaving a comment so SO notifies me when someone discovers it has foobarred their system :)
    – Adam
    Jun 16, 2023 at 15:39
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Apparently our GTK linux desktops in 2022 do not support thumbnailing of webp images out of the box, even though the Google developed image format is now quite common on the web. That could be due to compatibility issues between licensing or other reasons. Still, the default Gnome viewer, eog, supports webp out of the box.

It can be added to a linux system, though. A procedure is outlined on Linux Uprising (1 september 2021) or FOSSTips (around 14 Oktober). While the needed software is available from the software centers in Fedora, Arch linux and OpenSuse, surprisingly, it has to be compiled on Debian derived systems. However, It's Foss (September 23, 2021) refers to a third party PPA from which the software can be installed.

So there is a way, but for now it is less trivial to add the support in Ubuntu.

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