libvips

libvips is a demand-driven, horizontally threaded image processing library. Compared to similar libraries, libvips runs quickly and uses little memory. libvips is licensed under the LGPL-2.1-or-later.

It has around 300 operations covering arithmetic, histograms, convolution, morphological operations, frequency filtering, colour, resampling, statistics and others. It supports a large range of numeric types, from 8-bit int to 128-bit complex. Images can have any number of bands. It supports a good range of image formats, including JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XL, TIFF, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, FITS, Matlab, OpenEXR, PDF, SVG, HDR, PPM / PGM / PFM, CSV, GIF, Analyze, NIfTI, DeepZoom, and OpenSlide. It can also load images via ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick, letting it work with formats like DICOM.

It comes with bindings for C, C++, and the command-line. Full bindings are available for Ruby, Python, PHP, .NET, Go, Lua, and Java. libvips is used as an image processing engine by sharp (on node.js), bimg, sharp for Go, Ruby on Rails, carrierwave-vips, mediawiki, PhotoFlow and others. The official libvips GUI is nip2, a strange combination of a spreadsheet and an photo editor.

The download area has the source code plus pre-compiled binaries for Windows; you can install on macOS with homebrew, MacPorts or Fink; and it’s available in most Linux package managers. See the install notes.

News

• 2024-11-26 00:00:00 +0000

  nip4 November progress

  I’ve done another month on nip4 – plotting is in now, and I’ve done a first version of the new toolkit browser.

• 2024-10-19 00:00:00 +0000

  nip4 progress

  libvips.org OpenCollective has generously given me a year of funding to complete nip4. This is an update of the libvips GUI, nip2, to the gtk4 toolkit, and to the vips8 API.

• 2024-10-10 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in libvips 8.16

  Here’s a summary of what’s new in libvips 8.16. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2023-10-10 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in libvips 8.15

  libvips 8.15 is now done, so here’s a summary of what’s new. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2023-07-23 00:00:00 +0000

  vipsdisp 2.5 is out

  There’s a new version of vipsdisp, a gtk4 image viewer.

• 2023-04-06 00:00:00 +0000

  Charity bike ride

  This isn’t libvips at all, but I’ve entered a charity bike ride:

• 2022-12-22 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in libvips 8.14

  libvips 8.14 is now done, so here’s a summary of what’s new. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2022-05-28 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in libvips 8.13

  libvips 8.13 is now done, so here’s a summary of what’s new. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2022-04-18 00:00:00 +0000

  New pyvips and php-vips

  pyvips and php-vips have launched interesting new versions.

• 2021-11-14 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.12

  Here’s a quick overview of what’s new in libvips 8.12. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2021-06-04 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.11

  libvips 8.11 is now out, so here’s a quick overview of what’s new. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2021-03-08 00:00:00 +0000

  ruby-vips and image mutability

  ruby-vips is now at version 2.1 with a few useful bug fixes and an interesting new mutate feature. This block makes it possible to modify images efficiently and safely.

• 2020-09-01 00:00:00 +0000

  libvips for WebAssembly

  There's a new full libvips binding for the browser and Node.js. It supports reading and writing JPEG, PNG, WebP and TIFF images, it's on NPM, and it comes with TypeScript declarations.
• 2020-06-18 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.10

  libvips 8.10 is now out, so here’s a quick overview of what’s new. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2019-12-11 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.9

  libvips 8.9 is now done, so here’s a quick overview of what’s new. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2019-11-29 00:00:00 +0000

  True streaming for libvips

  An interesting feature has just landed in libvips git master (and should be in the upcoming libvips 8.9): true streaming. This has been talked about on and off for five years or more, but it’s now finally happened! This post explains what this feature is and why it could be useful.

• 2019-09-27 00:00:00 +0000

  libvips on opencollective

  Thanks to work by Lovell, libvips is now listed on opencollective.

• 2019-08-18 00:00:00 +0000

  pyvips in conda

  Thanks to work by Sebastian Luna-Valero (@sebastian-luna-valero) and others, pyvips is now in conda!

• 2019-08-18 00:00:00 +0000

  libvips in OSS Fuzz

  Thanks to work by Oscar Mira (@omira-sch), libvips has been in OSS Fuzz for about three weeks. I’m very happy to be able to report that only one real bug has been found so far, and none in the last five days.

• 2019-04-22 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.8

  libvips 8.8 is now officially released, so here’s a quick overview of what’s new. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2019-03-21 00:00:00 +0000

  NIP getting started video

  Here is a quick video on getting started with nip

• 2019-02-04 00:00:00 +0000

  Libre Graphics Meeting 2016

  I gave a 15m introduction to vips talk at LGM 2016, and just came across the video. It might be interesting.

• 2018-07-26 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.7

  libvips 8.7 is finally done!

• 2018-04-10 00:00:00 +0000

  libvips for .NET

  There’s a new full libvips binding for .NET. It has a test-suite which passes with no memory leaks, it’s in NuGet, so it’s easy to install on Linux, macOS and Windows, and it has nice documentation:

• 2017-11-28 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.6

  libvips 8.6 is done! Though it’s a bit late. This post summarizes what’s new – check the ChangeLog if you need more details.

• 2017-09-02 00:00:00 +0000

  libvips for Ruby

  There’s a new major release of ruby-vips, the Ruby binding for libvips: it’s now version 2.0. It has the same API (it passes the same test suite), but it’s simpler to install, works on Linux, macOS and Windows, it works with any Ruby (including JRuby), it’s smaller, more stable, and faster.

• 2017-09-01 00:00:00 +0000

  libvips for Python

  There’s a new libvips binding for Python. It has the same API as the one that comes with libvips (it passes the same test suite), it’s very easy to install on Linux, macOS and Windows, it works with any Python, it should be smaller and more stable, and it has nice new documentation:

• 2017-06-01 00:00:00 +0000

  libvips for Lua

  LuaJIT now has a full libvips binding. It’s the whole of libvips, it has a test-suite which passes with no memory leaks, and it’s in luarocks so it’s easy to install.

• 2017-03-28 00:00:00 +0000

  New website

  We have a new website running from github pages. Hopefully this will be easier to use and less work to maintain.

• 2017-03-16 00:00:00 +0000

  What's new in 8.5

  libvips 8.5 is done! This post summarizes what’s new in this release. Check the ChangeLog if you need more details.