I was surprised to find out just last week that webp images are basically universally supported by web browsers these days, which is something I somehow completely missed up until now. And so last week I went through my entire blog post history and manually replaced each photo and screenshot with a webp optimized version (with the exception of a few animated GIFs as I didn't want to recreate those).

While doing this I realized that out of the box Fedora does not actually support showing webp image thumbnails in the file browser (Nautilus) nor does Image Viewer support viewing them.

Fortunately, the fix is very easy; you just need to install a single package:

❯ sudo dnf install webp-pixbuf-loader

Now just restart Nautilus, and that's it!

❯ nautilus -q

You should immediately find webp image thumbnails show up, and Nautilus' preview (ie. pressing space with a file selected) and Image Viewer both working.

Neat!

Fedora Silverblue

Unfortunately there is no straight-forward way to get webp images to fully work under Fedora Silverblue as of this moment.

While Nautilus comes with support for it out of the box as of Fedora Silverblue 37 (so thumbnails show up right), both Sushi (The Nautilus Previewer – what you see when pressing spacebar in Nautilus with a file selected) and Eye of GNOME (Image Viewer) do not.

The latter is supposed to have this built-in by now, but Fedora's build as of this writing (2023-04-05) does not seem to actually have this working. Flathub's release does work already, so you can remove Fedora's build and switch over to Flathub's:

❯ flatpak install --system --reinstall flathub org.gnome.eog

As of 2023-04-05, Sushi (Nautilus Previewer) does seem to now correctly support webp, so nothing has to be done there. Nice!