libvips is a 2D 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, convolutions, morphological operations, frequency filtering, colour, resampling, statistics and others. It supports a large range of numeric formats, from 8-bit int to 128-bit complex. It supports a good range of image formats, including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, WebP, FITS, Matlab, OpenEXR, PDF, SVG, HDR, PPM, CSV, GIF, Analyze, DeepZoom, and OpenSlide. It can also load images via ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick.
It has APIs for C and C++ and comes with a Python binding and a command-line interface. Bindings are available for Ruby, PHP, Go, Lua, JavaScript and others. There is full documentation. There are several GUIs as well, see the VIPS website.
There are packages for most unix-like operating systems and binaries for Windows and OS X.
We keep pre-baked tarballs of releases on the vips website:
https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips/releases
Untar, then in the libvips directory you should just be able to do:
$ ./configure
Check the summary at the end of configure carefully.
libvips must have build-essential, pkg-config, glib2.0-dev,
libexpat1-dev.
For the vips8 Python binding, you must also have
gobject-introspection, python-gi-dev, and libgirepository1.0-dev.
You'll need the dev packages for the file format support you
want. For basic jpeg and tiff support, you'll need libtiff5-dev,
libjpeg-turbo8-dev, and libgsf-1-dev. See the Dependencies section
below for a full list of the things that libvips can be configured to use.
Once configure is looking OK, compile and install with the usual:
$ make
$ sudo make install
By default this will install files to /usr/local.
We have detailed guides on the wiki for building on Windows and building on OS X.
Checkout the latest sources with:
$ git clone git://github.com/jcupitt/libvips.git
Building from git needs more packages, you'll need at least swig, gtk-doc
and gobject-introspection, see the dependencies section below. For example:
$ brew install gtk-doc swig
Then build the build system with:
$ ./autogen.sh
Debug build:
$ CFLAGS="-g -Wall" CXXFLAGS="-g -Wall" \
./configure --prefix=/home/john/vips --enable-debug
$ make
$ make install
Leak check:
$ export G_DEBUG=gc-friendly
$ valgrind --suppressions=libvips.supp \
--leak-check=yes \
vips ... > vips-vg.log 2>&1
Memory error debug:
$ valgrind --vgdb=yes --vgdb-error=0 vips ...
valgrind threading check:
$ valgrind --tool=helgrind vips ... > vips-vg.log 2>&1
Clang build:
$ CC=clang CXX=clang++ ./configure --prefix=/home/john/vips
Clang static analysis:
$ scan-build ./configure --disable-introspection --disable-debug
$ scan-build -o scan -v make
$ scan-view scan/2013-11-22-2
Clang dynamic analysis:
$ FLAGS="-O1 -g -fsanitize=address"
$ FLAGS="$FLAGS -fno-omit-frame-pointer -fno-optimize-sibling-calls"
$ CC=clang CXX=clang++ LD=clang \
CFLAGS="$FLAGS" CXXFLAGS="$FLAGS" LDFLAGS=-fsanitize=address \
./configure --prefix=/home/john/vips
$ FLAGS="-O1 -g -fsanitize=thread"
$ FLAGS="$FLAGS -fPIC"
$ FLAGS="$FLAGS -fno-omit-frame-pointer -fno-optimize-sibling-calls"
$ CC=clang CXX=clang++ LD=clang \
CFLAGS="$FLAGS" CXXFLAGS="$FLAGS" \
LDFLAGS="-fsanitize=thread -fPIC" \
./configure --prefix=/home/john/vips \
--without-magick \
--disable-introspection
$ G_DEBUG=gc-friendly vips copy ~/pics/k2.jpg x.jpg >& log
Build with the GCC auto-vectorizer and diagnostics (or just -O3):
$ FLAGS="-O2 -msse4.2 -ffast-math"
$ FLAGS="$FLAGS -ftree-vectorize -fdump-tree-vect-details"
$ CFLAGS="$FLAGS" CXXFLAGS="$FLAGS" \
./configure --prefix=/home/john/vips
Static analysis with:
$ cppcheck --force --enable=style . &> cppcheck.log
libvips has to have glib2.0-dev. Other dependencies are optional, see below.
If suitable versions are found, libvips will add support for the following
libraries automatically. See ./configure --help for a set of flags to
control library detection. Packages are generally found with pkg-config,
so make sure that is working.
libtiff, giflib and libjpeg do not usually use pkg-config so libvips looks for
them in the default path and in $prefix. If you have installed your own
versions of these libraries in a different location, libvips will not see
them. Use switches to libvips configure like:
./configure --prefix=/Users/john/vips \
--with-giflib-includes=/opt/local/include \
--with-giflib-libraries=/opt/local/lib \
--with-tiff-includes=/opt/local/include \
--with-tiff-libraries=/opt/local/lib \
--with-jpeg-includes=/opt/local/include \
--with-jpeg-libraries=/opt/local/lib
or perhaps:
CFLAGS="-g -Wall -I/opt/local/include -L/opt/local/lib" \
CXXFLAGS="-g -Wall -I/opt/local/include -L/opt/local/lib" \
./configure --without-python --prefix=/Users/john/vips
to get libvips to see your builds.
If gobject-introspection, python-gi-dev, and libgirepository1.0-dev are
available, libvips will install the vips8 Python binding.
The IJG JPEG library. Use the -turbo version if you can.
If available, libvips adds support for EXIF metadata in JPEG files.
The standard gif loader. If this is not present, vips will try to load gifs via imagemagick instead.
The usual SVG loader. If this is not present, vips will try to load SVGs via imagemagick instead.
The usual PDF loader. If this is not present, vips will try to load PDFs via imagemagick instead.
If available, libvips adds support for creating image pyramids with dzsave.
The TIFF library. It needs to be built with support for JPEG and ZIP compression. 3.4b037 and later are known to be OK.
If libvips finds this library, it uses it for fourier transforms.
If present, vips_icc_import(), vips_icc_export() and vips_icc_transform()
are available for transforming images with ICC profiles. If lcms2 is
available it is used in preference to lcms, since it is faster.
libvips uses the standard autoconf tests to work out how to support large files (>2GB) on your system. Any reasonably recent unix should be OK.
If present, libvips can load and save png files.
If available, libvips adds support for loading all libMagick-supported
image file types. Use --with-magickpackage=GraphicsMagick to build against
graphicsmagick instead.
Imagemagick 6.9+ needs to have been built with --with-modules. Most packaged
IMs are, I think, but if you are rolling your own, you'll need to pass
this flag to configure.
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 using a package with such a large attack surface. You might prefer not to enable Magick support.
If available, libvips adds support for text rendering. You need the
package pangoft2 in pkg-config --list-all.
If available, vips will accelerate some operations with this run-time compiler.
If available, vips can load images from Matlab save files.
If available, vips can load FITS images.
If available, vips can load and save WebP images.
If available, libvips will directly read (but not write, sadly) OpenEXR images.
If available, libvips can load OpenSlide-supported virtual slide files: Aperio, Hamamatsu, Leica, MIRAX, Sakura, Trestle, and Ventana.
If available, we build the vips7 python binding.
No guarantees of performance accompany this software, nor is any responsibility assumed on the part of the authors. Please read the licence agreement.