pyvips and php-vips have launched interesting new versions.

pyvips

pyvips version 2.2 is just out and thanks to work by erdmann features a range of useful new features.

PIL and numpy

pyvips now has much better integration with numpy and PIL. For example, you can make a Numpy array like this:

import numpy as np

a = (np.random.random((100, 100, 3)) * 255).astype(np.uint8)

Then wrap a pyvips image around it using Image.new_from_array:

import pyvips

image = pyvips.Image.new_from_array(a)

pyvips will even guess a sensible interpretaion for you (sRGB in this case), or you can specify with the optional interpretation= argument. This works by sharing a memory buffer between the two libraries, so no data is copied or duplicated, just a pointer.

Going the other way, you can make a numpy array from a pyvips image using Image.numpy():

a1 = image.numpy()

Or just use numpy’s asarray():

a1 = np.asarray(image)

Again, there’s no copying of data, just a pointer, so this is a fast way for numpy to load many image formats.

You can use the same method to make a PIL image:

import PIL.Image

image = pyvips.Image.black(100, 100, bands=3)
pil_image = PIL.Image.fromarray(image.numpy())

Or to make a pyvips image from PIL:

pil_image = PIL.Image.new('RGB', (60, 30), color='red')
image = pyvips.Image.new_from_array(pil_image)

Again, no copying.

Improved indexing

Band indexing now supports an optional step. For example:

iamge = image[::-1]

Will reverse the bands in an image, so RGB becomes BGR. You can also index with a list of bools. The docs have all the details.

Other improvements

There’s a new invalidate method you can use to throw images out of the various libvips caches, a useful speedup for pyvips method call, and support for Path objects for load and save.

php-vips

Version 2.0 of php-vips has been rebuilt on top of php’s new FFI module. This new version should be much simpler to maintain, develop, support and install.

php-vips used to come in two parts: there was a PHP extension written in C called php-vips-ext which gave very low-level access to libvips, and a pure PHP layer (called php-vips) which implemented the public API.

This setup was tricky to manage for a range of reasons, but maintaining the C extension was the hardest part. It was nasty to install as well, with many users having issues getting it to work.

PHP now has an FFI interface to external libraries, so we’ve rewritten php-vips to use that to make calls directly into libvips. The public API hasn’t changed, so everyone’s code should still work.