An appeal for webp metadata write support.

[HaujetZhao]

Allow me to tell the reason from beginning:

Recently, I came up a idea: to compress my high resolution, high quality photos into a 3MP copy, so that my phone can easily carry 100,000 adequate photo copies with no worry about storage, all the adding and updating process can be finished by python scripts.

After a comparison, I found that:

- under same 3M 70% quality, the webp photo average size is 130kB, while the jpg photo takes 260kB, and the webp version has much more detail and quality than jpeg! It's quality/size ratio is really astonishing. The point that I love is webp don't have the fuzzy blur on the detail (which is quite a chore on jpg format when the quality is low)
- webp is open source, free, supported by web companies widely (the charging HEIF, I'm staring at you)

After a script conversion (using ImageMagick), I found that some of my original photos have no EXIF dates from the beginning. That's when I start learning ExifTool. I rewrote the CreationDate by clues in the filename using ExifTool. Then I found that my webp photos didn't change.

After reading the format part of the doc, then I know ExifTool only support reading webp metadata.

I searched the forum, found few words for webp write support, so I think it worth create a new thread about it. I wish this appeal can be adopted. Webp is truly a great photo format at this era.

[StarGeek]

Part of the problem is that webp/webm is based upon Matroska which is pretty complex, I believe.  Additionally, it doesn't have a set of standard tags, instead allowing for arbitrary TAG=VALUE pairs.

That said, I've started collecting some webp/webm files for a virtual table top program that uses them and it would be nice to be able to keep track of them better with embedded data. 

[Phil Harvey]

WebM is Matroska based, but WebP is RIFF-based.

I'm working on adding WebP write support to ExifTool 12.46.  See this post for more information.

- Phil

[sx8999]

Just out of curiosity: Is there any plan to integrate WebM / MKV in the long run w.r.t. "at least" be able to set some standard tags like Dates etc...? Or is this just to substantially difficult to add support for it? Thanks!

[Phil Harvey]

No plans at the moment.

Adding write support for any format, especially video formats, is a lot of work so there needs to be a strong demand before it is worthwhile to implement.

- Phil