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.

Credit to lovell, erdmann, clcaalu, felixbuenemann, GDmac, gvincke, lhecker, kleisauke, jtorresfabra, martinweihrauch and others for their great work on this release.

Support for HEIC images

libvips now has heifload and heifsave — load and save for HEIC images. This is the new image compression standard being used by Apple and others. HEIC files are typically half the size of JPEG files at similar quality.

It uses the very nice libheif library and, as well as suporting HEIC, should support a range of formats on the way which are expected to use the heif container.

Better support for animated images

libvips now supports load and save of animated WebP images, and has better suport for animated GIFs.

For example:

$ vipsthumbnail dancing_banana2.lossless.webp -o x.gif

Makes:

But:

$ vipsthumbnail dancing_banana2.lossless.webp[n=-1] -o x.gif

Makes:

It’ll work for any many-page format, so you can thumbnail many-page TIFFs, or even PDFs. For example:

$ time vipsthumbnail nipguide.pdf[n=-1] -o x.webp
real  0m0.859s
user  0m0.900s
sys 0m0.085s

That’s rendering a 40 page PDF as an animated webp image in 0.8s, though I’m not sure if it’s a useful thing to do.

Built-in colour profiles

libvips now has two built-in ICC profiles (srgb and cmyk), you can use them anywhere, and they are used automatically when necessary. These profiles are compiled directly into the libvips shared library so there are no extra files to ship or to get lost.

For example, you can use colourspace like this:

$ vips colourspace cmyk-no-profile.jpg x.png srgb

To convert a CMYK JPEG file to PNG, even when the JPEG has no embedded colour profile. If the JPEG does have an embedded profile, that will be used in preference.

You can use the special strings cmyk and srgb anywhere where you can give the filename of a colour profile. For example:

$ vips icc_export k2.jpg x.tif --output-profile cmyk

Will convert a JPEG to a CMYK TIFF.

Faster thumbnailing of complex image types

Shrink-on-load support has been added to TIFF (for pyramidal images) and OpenSlide, and thumbnail can exploit it. This means you can generate high-quality thumbnails of huge images very quickly.

For example:

$ ls -l 2013_09_20_29.ndpi
-rw-r--r-- 1 john john 4101070956 May  7  2015  2013_09_20_29.ndpi
$ time vipsthumbnail 2013_09_20_29.ndpi
real	0m0.305s
user	0m0.199s
sys	0m0.082s

So it can thumbnail a 4GB slide image in 300ms on this laptop.

thumbnail also knows about HEIC images and can thumbnail them quickly.

Other image format improvements

There are a range of other useful improvements to image file handling. PNG load/save now supports XMP, WebP compression is better, loading GIF uses much less memory, magick load and save now supports all metadata, and finally dzsave has better SZI support and a flag that lets you skip blank tiles.

Improvements to libvips operators

There are no new operators in this release, but there are quite a few improvements to the existing ones.

Lovell Fuller has revised smartcrop again. It’s now much, much faster, and should produce better results on a wider range of images. As well as centre, you can also now crop low and high.

composite has been revised again to improve performance when compositing a small image on to a large image. Previously, the small image was expanded to the size of the large image and then joined at every pixel. We’ve now added a culling system, so each output area only computes the input images that thouch it. This can give a huge speed up if you join many small images on to one large image.

The text operator now supports justification.

Breaking changes

The old Python and C++ interfaces were deprecated in 8.7, and they’ve now been removed completely. You no longer need swig to build from git. Hooray!

thumbnail will now always use EXIF orientation to spin images upright, and the old auto_rotate flags does nothing. There’s a new no_rotate option you can set to prevent this behaviour, if you wish.

Other

Plus many even smaller bug fixes and improvements. As usual, the ChangeLog has more details, if you’re interested.