On 18 November 2011, Google announced a new lossless compression mode, and support for transparency ( alpha channel) in both lossless and lossy modes support was enabled by default in libwebp 0.2.0 (16 August 2012). Older animated GIF files can be converted to animated WebP. Tiling support was never finalized and was removed from the spec again. On 3 October 2011, Google added an 'Extended File Format' allowing WebP support for animation, ICC profile, XMP and Exif metadata, and tiling (compositing very large images from maximum 16383×16383 tiles). WebP-related software is released under a BSD free software license. As a derivative of the VP8 video format, it is a sister project to the WebM multimedia container format.

It was based on technology which Google had acquired with the purchase of On2 Technologies. WebP was first announced by Google on 30 September in 2010 as a new open format for lossy compressed true-color graphics on the web, producing files that were smaller than JPEG files for comparable image quality. Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency.

WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats.

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