https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114532

--- Comment #27 from Mike Kaganski <[email protected]> ---
(In reply to Tomaz Vajngerl from comment #26)

TL;DR summary of the following: that is a very dangerous and serves only a
couple of users.

The idea to save both formats (one as fallback) would only serve people who
have the ultimate goal to get to the original bytes at some unspecified future
time. What is the real use case, that would require someone to desperately need
the original embedded image bytes, as opposed to a converted copy?

OTOH, there are *real* use cases, that would be served poorly by that decision.
1. People who chose WebP to save space. Well, PNG is not ideal for those; but
speculating that 110% is better for those who are unhappy with 100% is not
reasonable, right? And we possibly need to have a "convert lossy WebP to"
option with JPEG and PNG, like we have in Compress dialog - as you suggest.
2. People who didn't even realize they used a WebP (IMO, the vast majority, who
e.g. dragged the images from a web page). They don't care about the image
original format at all. They would have to pay their disk space (that +10%) for
a couple of those who needed it.

And the last category of users would be in real danger then. You argue that the
idea behind saving both formats is being able to return to WebP at some later
stage - meaning that the fallback PNG would be dropped, right? But that means
that at some update, unprepared users would suddenly have their existing
documents dropping embedded PNGs, which they would not notice, because they use
a version that supports the format; but you have no control who is their
recipients are, and what they use. Of course, the decision to drop PNG would
happen when WebP support in ODF readers is reasonable, but you can't guarantee
100% - and that means that *existing* edited documents with pre-existing images
can suddenly become unreadable on colleagues' systems where they used to be
working. It would be OK to argue "you use a modern program that supports WebP;
you have just inserted a WebP into a new document; it's OK that this image is
not shown on your colleague who uses AOO 4.1" - but it is *not* OK to tell that
about document that they had happily edited for long time, and that broke after
editing with updated LO, without any image insertion.

So IMO:

1. If people want to be notified about conversion, do that using an infobar
(just inform, do not ask and do not provide options there, except maybe a
button to go to relevant configuration, or to help).
2. Provide a (preferably expert) option to *not* convert at all - i.e., for
those who really want to use WebP, let them have the WebP - with no fallback.
3. Provide an option to convert lossy WebP to JPEG instead of PNG.
4. Do not complicate things with a fallback. That will inevitably hit much more
users in long term, than those who benefit from that.

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