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Pablo Bianchi
Asked: 2021-06-20 12:06:35 +0800 CST

How to add WebP support to Eye of GNOME

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WebP image files are becoming more and more common on the web. Eye of GNOME (eog) doesn't support it out-of-the-box. Some browsers do, and ImageMagick just installing webp package (magick/convert -list format).

A simple search let you to webp-pixbuf-loader but might be not that easy for beginners.

Reference

eog

2 Answers

  1. Follow these steps to add support for WebP to Eye of GNOME:

    1. Prebuild

      sudo apt install git meson ninja-build
cd /tmp/
git clone https://github.com/aruiz/webp-pixbuf-loader
cd webp-pixbuf-loader/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/*/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders /usr/bin/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders  # https://github.com/aruiz/webp-pixbuf-loader/issues/9#issuecomment-537437407

    2. Build on Debian/Ubuntu

      meson builddir -Dgdk_pixbuf_query_loaders_path=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders
ninja -C builddir

    3. Install

      sudo ninja -C builddir install

    4. Test

      wget -O /tmp/samplefile.webp "https://www.gstatic.com/webp/gallery/1.sm.webp"
eog /tmp/samplefile.webp

    Default app for .webp (image/webp internet media type)

    From EOG issue eog.desktop doesn't include webp mimetype:

    After installing https://github.com/aruiz/webp-pixbuf-loader eog loads webp images properly... but it is still not added as supported mime type to the .desktop file and, as a consequence, is not offered by default to open those images

    To fix this:

    # Get info
xdg-mime query filetype /tmp/samplefile.webp      # MIME type of the file: image/webp
xdg-mime query default image/webp                 # .desktop filename of the application which is registered

# Set open .webp with eog
xdg-mime default org.gnome.eog.desktop image/webp # Ask the desktop environment to make application the default application for opening files of type mimetype: Search on ~/.local/share/applications/ (user-wide) or /usr/share/applications/ (system-wide).
sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime         # Apply system-wide

# Test
xdg-open /tmp/samplefile.webp

    Of course, change org.gnome.eog.desktop to whatever you want.

    See also

    • 10

  2. These dependent packages should be installed.

    sudo apt install libwebp-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev meson build-essential

    then, build and install like this.

    git clone https://github.com/aruiz/webp-pixbuf-loader
cd webp-pixbuf-loader/
meson builddir -Dgdk_pixbuf_query_loaders_path=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders
ninja -C builddir
sudo ninja -C builddir install
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