A dense fog visited my area one morning. I grabbed the camera and headed out. I took photos as I went along, moving quickly for I know the fog may not last. At Riverdale, I framed the image above, and as I took the photo, a walker and her lively dog entered the picture. I fired a couple shots resulting in an image sequence.
It was the end of winter. Snow had melted and receded to small patches, dotting the landscape. As I made my way towards the valley, I saw the dog again. He spotted the snow and dragged the walker towards it. He dived in and frolicking in it, shook his body and then sat in it like it was a warm rug.
Sorting through the hundreds of photos, I was always faced with a dilemma of choosing an image out of a sequence. Which one do I choose when the variations were similarly good? Too similar to present as a new and different photo.
As I surfed news websites these days, I began seeing a lot of webp images showing up. I know webp. It came from webm video format. I started following its development when it was first announced to the public some 10 years ago. Touting as an open-sourced replacement for Jpeg, Png, and Gif. I saw potential for quality creativity that Gif lacks. But user's adoption and software support were slow and sluggish. And then shortly after, they announced a newer update - AV1 video format, and its image counterpart - AVIF. AVIF does everything WebP does and more. And so I put webp to sleep.
Novomesk, a programer, recently put up an AVIF plugin for Gimp for people to try out. His plugin would allow the saving of animated image in AVIF format. I installed Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and tested Novomesk's plugin. His AVIF doesn't work. It just created a static image. No animation. Will have to wait for his update. In the interim, I noticed there's a WebP format down the “File Saving” list. I tried that out, and it worked.
