libvips alternatives and similar libraries
Based on the "Image Processing" category.
Alternatively, view libvips alternatives based on common mentions on social networks and blogs.
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OpenMVG (open Multiple View Geometry)
open Multiple View Geometry library. Basis for 3D computer vision and Structure from Motion. -
OpenImageIO
Reading, writing, and processing images in a wide variety of file formats, using a format-agnostic API, aimed at VFX applications. -
OpenEXR
The OpenEXR project provides the specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format, the professional-grade image storage format of the motion picture industry. -
ITK
Insight Toolkit (ITK) -- Official Repository. ITK builds on a proven, spatially-oriented architecture for processing, segmentation, and registration of scientific images in two, three, or more dimensions. -
GDCM
Grassroots DICOM read-only mirror. Only for Pull Request. Please report bug at http://sf.net/p/gdcm -
AVIR
High-quality pro HDR image resizing / scaling C++ library, including a very fast, precise, SIMD Lanczos resizer (header-only C++) -
SAIL
The missing small and fast image decoding library for humans (not for machines) ⛵ https://sail.software -
CxImage
DISCONTINUED. An image processing and conversion library to load, save, display, transform BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX, TGA, WMF, WBMP, JBG, J2K images. [zlib] -
FreeImage
A custom distribution of FreeImage, with a CMake-based build system. Used by the Athena Game Framework. -
FLOP
FLOꟼ - An MIT-licensed image viewer equipped with a GPU-accelerated perceptual image diffing algorithm based on ꟻLIP
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
* Code Quality Rankings and insights are calculated and provided by Lumnify.
They vary from L1 to L5 with "L5" being the highest.
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README
libvips : an image processing library
Introduction
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+.
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, JPEG2000, 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 :
Language | Binding |
---|---|
Ruby | ruby-vips |
Python | pyvips |
PHP | php-vips |
C# / .NET | NetVips |
Go | govips |
Lua | lua-vips |
Crystal | crystal-vips |
Elixir | vix |
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 a photo editor.
Install
There are packages for most Unix-like operating systems, including macOS. Check your package manager.
There are binaries for Windows in releases.
The libvips website has detailed install notes.
Building from source
libvips uses the Meson build system, version 0.56
or later. Meson can use ninja
, Visual Studio or
XCode as a backend, so you'll also need one of them.
libvips must have build-essential
, pkg-config
, libglib2.0-dev
,
libexpat1-dev
. See the Dependencies section below for a full list
of the libvips optional dependencies.
There are basic bash completions in completions/
, see the README in there.
Cheatsheet
cd libvips-x.y.x
meson build --prefix /my/install/prefix
cd build
meson compile
meson test
meson install
Check the output of meson setup
carefully and make sure it found everything
you wanted it to find. Add arguments to meson setup
to change the build
configuration.
Add flags like
-Dnsgif=false
to turn libvips options on and off, seemeson_options.txt
for a list of all the build options libvips supports.Add flags like
-Dmagick=disabled
to turn libvips dependencies on and off, seemeson_options.txt
and the list below for a summary of all the libvips dependencies.Meson will do a debug build by default. Add
--buildtype release
for a release (optimised) build.You might need to add
--libdir lib
on Debian if you don't want the arch name in the library path.Add
--default-library static
for a static build.Use eg.
CC=clang CXX=clang++ meson setup ...
to change compiler.You can have many
build-dir
, pick whatever names you like, for example one for release and one for debug.
There's a more comprehensive test suite you can run once libvips has been
installed. Use pytest
in the libvips base directory.
Optional dependencies
If suitable versions are found, libvips will add support for the following
libraries automatically. Packages are generally found with pkg-config
,
so make sure that is working.
libjpeg
Anything that is compatible with the IJG JPEG library. Use mozjpeg
if you
can. Another option is libjpeg-turbo
.
libexif
If available, libvips adds support for EXIF metadata in JPEG files.
librsvg
The usual SVG loader. If this is not present, vips will try to load SVGs via imagemagick instead.
PDFium
If present, libvips will attempt to load PDFs with PDFium. Download the prebuilt pdfium binary from:
https://github.com/bblanchon/pdfium-binaries
Untar to the libvips install prefix, for example:
cd ~/vips
tar xf ~/pdfium-linux.tgz
Create a pdfium.pc
like this (update the version number):
VIPSHOME=/home/john/vips
cat > $VIPSHOME/lib/pkgconfig/pdfium.pc << EOF
prefix=$VIPSHOME
exec_prefix=\${prefix}
libdir=\${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=\${prefix}/include
Name: pdfium
Description: pdfium
Version: 4290
Requires:
Libs: -L\${libdir} -lpdfium
Cflags: -I\${includedir}
EOF
If PDFium is not detected, libvips will look for poppler-glib
instead.
poppler-glib
The Poppler PDF renderer, with a glib API. If this is not present, vips will try to load PDFs via imagemagick.
cgif
If available, libvips will save GIFs with cgif. If this is not present, vips will try to save gifs via imagemagick instead.
libgsf-1
If available, libvips adds support for creating image pyramids with dzsave
.
libtiff
The TIFF library. It needs to be built with support for JPEG and ZIP compression. 3.4b037 and later are known to be OK.
fftw3
If libvips finds this library, it uses it for fourier transforms.
lcms2
If present, vips_icc_import()
, vips_icc_export()
and vips_icc_transform()
can be used to manipulate images with ICC profiles.
libspng
If present, libvips will load and save PNG files using libspng. If not, it will look for the standard libpng package.
libimagequant, quantizr
If one of these quantisation packages is present, libvips can write 8-bit palette-ised PNGs and GIFs.
ImageMagick, or optionally GraphicsMagick
If available, libvips adds support for loading and saving all libMagick-supported image file types. You can enable and disable load and save separately.
Imagemagick 6.9+ needs to have been built with --with-modules
. Most packaged
IMs are, I think.
If you are going to be using libvips with untrusted images, perhaps in a web server, for example, you should consider the security implications of enabling a package with such a large attack surface.
pangocairo
If available, libvips adds support for text rendering. You need the
package pangocairo in pkg-config --list-all
.
orc-0.4
If available, vips will accelerate some operations with this run-time compiler.
matio
If available, vips can load images from Matlab save files.
cfitsio
If available, vips can load FITS images.
libwebp
If available, vips can load and save WebP images.
libniftiio
If available, vips can load and save NIfTI images.
OpenEXR
If available, libvips will directly read (but not write, sadly) OpenEXR images.
OpenJPEG
If available, libvips will read and write JPEG2000 images.
libjxl
If available, libvips will read and write JPEG-XL images.
OpenSlide
If available, libvips can load OpenSlide-supported virtual slide files: Aperio, Hamamatsu, Leica, MIRAX, Sakura, Trestle, and Ventana.
libheif
If available, libvips can load and save HEIC and AVIF images. Your libheif (in turn) needs to be built with the correct decoders and encoders. You can check with eg.:
$ pkg-config libheif --print-variables
builtin_avif_decoder
builtin_avif_encoder
builtin_h265_decoder
builtin_h265_encoder
exec_prefix
includedir
libdir
pcfiledir
prefix
Contributors
Code Contributors
This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute.
Organizations
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*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the libvips README section above
are relevant to that project's source code only.