Webp in gmail / transparency issues

[Etienne Loiseau]

Hi there,

It's been a while now since i'm struggling with an issue over webp images embbeded in mails sent to gmail users.

Concret case being better than any word :    

Those two pictos are fully transparent and display well in every other webmail or mail client, but here, for some reasons, they won't and will display that black background I can't figure out how to get rid of...

I really don't know what I'm missing there, if someone can enlighten me, that'd be really appreciated.

Thanks in adavance

[Yannis Guyon]

Thanks for your report.

This is a known missing feature from GMail back end. It converts WebP images into JPEG ones for compatibility purposes. Assuming you attached a WebP Twitter logo, it is now displayed as a JPEG (even if its extension is .webp).

I bumped the internal thread for this issue.

The current workaround is to use PNG or GIF for images that require translucency or animation. An alternative for alpha is to bake the background color into the images (but this may not always be possible or work well with night mode).

[Loiseau2nuit]

Hi Yannis, and thanks for this feedback. I've been digging on it for months now, unable to find the reason why.

Quite funny, actually, that the one conglomerate pushing webp over the world, is also the one not able to deal with it correctly in it's own tools 😂

As we say in french : "Les cordonniers sont toujours les plus mal chaussés" ("Shoemakers are always the worst shod" even if I'm not sure it makes any sense in english 😅)

Anyway, thanks for bumping that internal thread and I hope a solution will be found soon, as in my organisation, we've decreased by nearly a half the weight of the data, dealt with daily by our mail servers just by replacing PNGs with WebPs in our enterprise signatures (which was one of the solutions we've been asked for, to meet performances and digital sobriety challenges). It would be sad to go back to PNGs now.

Let's wait and see.

Thanks again

[Amit Aits]

Reporting exact the same issue.

In our case images are fetched from the CDN which costs 5x if PNG format is used 😏

Kindly fix this.

Regards.

[David Strom]

This is pretty ridiculous! I go through so much effort to make our emails gmail darkmode compatible -- then stakeholders complain the PNGs are too big. Finally I say... the problem is that GMAIL is the only email client that does not support webp

What irony!