It seems like either
-
I get a
.webp
file when I don’t want it (downloading images) -
I try to use a
.webp
format, but it isn’t allowed (uploading images)
So who is trying to encourage people to use it, and who is trying to prevent adoption?
I’m constantly converting it with imagemagick and other tools
In that last case, it is usually performed by rewriting the uri of the image. Those images will typically have query strings after the filename that get the optimized versions. If you remove the query strings parts you normally get the original image.
That’s not always the case. With Akamai I can very easily enable this tool on all images on my employers website and there will be no easy way for a user to bypass it.
I just took a look at www.frankandoak.com which Akamai says is a user of this tool (and not my employer). They’re a clothing retailer and have a lot of images on their site. Using the developer tools in Chrome I can see that a lot of their images of products are being served as webp even though the file extensions are jpg. It looks like they add version numbers as parameters on image urls, and removing those effectively does nothing. I’m still served webp versions of those images.
that site uses shopify (and runs through cloudflare for my origin ip). shopify has their own image and video ‘processing’ available to their hosted sites.
Curious then that Akamai touts them as a success story:
https://www.akamai.com/resources/customer-story/frank-and-oak