Show HN: WebPtoPNG – I built a WebP to PNG tool, everything runs in the browser

[akseli_ukkonen]

I built WebPtoPNG after getting frustrated with converters that throttle uploads or phone data; everything runs straight in the browser, and never asks for a signup.

[breve]

> I built WebPtoPNG after getting frustrated with converters that throttle uploads or phone data

Why would you want to do it in a browser anyway? Just run it local. There are many open source image editors and converters to choose from.

ImageMagick is one: https://imagemagick.org/

GIMP is another: https://www.gimp.org/

Krita is another: https://krita.org/en/

[xeonmc]

People don't want to install/download/vet reputation of local apps for spontaneous, one-off tasks.

[breve]

But people will vet a website that has the potential to change every day? Each time you visit the site the behaviour could be different. Vetting the site every time you use it would be profoundly tedious.

When you install an application you can vet the version you want to use, keep the installer so you can always reinstall the same version, and it only changes when you change it. That's much better control.

Luckily, all of the image editors I listed are well known and trustworthy. They're good tools. You're much better off learning them and making full use of their capability than using some limited web based image converter.

[bcye]

You only need to vet the website if you care about the privacy of the picture, and a website is run in a reliably sandboxed environment, whereas local tools run with much more elevated permissions.

[baobun]

50/50 you have either ImageMagick or ffmpeg installed already.

[pwdisswordfishy]

Although I can't speak for everyone, my browser runs locally.

[zipping1549]

Why use GUI at all? ffmpeg does it one-liner, a very long one.

[RealStickman_]

Imagemagick also does it in the terminal. Chances are about as good as ffmpeg that you have it installed already

[Evidlo]

Some ideas for improvements:

- Can you support more formats besides Webp and PNG?

- Too much text on the interface - This reads more like a landing page for a startup than a SPA tool. Compare to e.g. [0]

[0]: https://dinoosauro.github.io/image-converter/

[xeonmc]

Also, the aesthetic design is too "professional" and therefore not trustworthy.

A trustworthy utility page should look like a CSS-less crappy HTML form.

[Yash16]

Do you support integrations or provide open-source APIs? I want to integrate this with https://picxstudio.com and enable easy, browser-based downloads in multiple image formats.

[DaleCurtis]

FWIW, you can do this with a few lines of JS in the browser using canvas.drawImage() from an img element followed by canvas.toBlob().

[valadaptive]

Firefox now adds random noise to all canvas readback operations (getImageData, toDataURL, and toBlob).

[DaleCurtis]

Ah, I didn't realize that always happened. I thought it was only if you did something that might have OS specific rendering characteristics (text-draws, etc).

Maybe having an ImageEncoder API might be worthwhile after all then https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs/issues/204.

[fouc]

That would require a browser that supports WebP

[theandrewbailey]

...which is, like, all of them released over the past 5 years: https://caniuse.com/webp

[gethly]

You can compile VIPS or similar library into WASM and avoid doing much work yourself.

[fouc]

Does this work on a browser that doesn't support WebP? That would be useful.

[alexpham14]

I appreciate the meticulousness of the website.