VIPS

From VipsWiki

What is it?

VIPS is a free image processing system. It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM you have available), with many CPUs (see Benchmarks for examples of SMP scaling, VIPS is also part of the PARSEC suite), for working with colour and for general research & development.

Compared to most image processing libraries, VIPS needs little RAM and runs quickly, especially on machines with more than one CPU. See the Speed and Memory Use page for a simple benchmark. We have a How it works page with a brief technical explanation of how VIPS calculates pixels.

It comes in two main parts: libvips is the image-processing library and nip2 is the graphical user-interface. The GUI aims to be about half-way between Photoshop and Excel. It is very bad at retouching photographs, but very handy for the many other imaging tasks that programs like Photoshop are used for.

Both work on Unix (with convenient packages for most popular distributions, see links), Windows (NT, 2k, XP, Vista tested) and Macintosh (OS 10.2 and later). The VIPS library is licensed under the LGPL and and the user-interfaces are licensed under the GPL. See http://www.gnu.org.

Download

Supported 

Download and install the current supported version.

Development 

Read about and download the sources for the current development version.

VIPS aims for a six-month development cycle. Anyone can contribute, see the Development pages for notes on how to work on the code yourself.

Documentation and Support

Here are some quick guides to introduce nip2, the VIPS GUI. These guides are part of the nip2 manual: click Help / Contents (or press F1) to view the guide while using the program.

Quick interface tour 

Runs quickly though some easy stuff to show how the interface works.

Infrared reflectogram mosaic tour 

Explains how to use nip2 to build reflectogram mosaics.

Nerd tour 

Goes into some detail about the insides of nip2 and how to program your own widgets.

The Documentation page has all the docs for nip2 and for libvips. The Contact page has the mailing list details (subscribe to ask questions, get news updates and contribute) and the names and addresses of the maintainers. The Examples page summarises the example workspaces that come with nip2. Several of the HOWTO guides are worked examples.

Site highlights

News 

News about VIPS.

Screenshots 

Various screenshots.

Documentation 

Documentation for the current supported version.

FAQ 

Frequently asked questions.

Contact 

Maintainers and the mailing list.

Links 

Related sites, pages about VIPS, people who use VIPS.

Quotes 

From users/developers.

Other stuff

What's New in 7.20 

We've just released 7.20, a fancy new version. This page explains what's new in headline form.

Hello World 

Minimal programs using VIPS, handy for testing.

HOWTO 

Various HOWTO guides, including building on windows.

History 

How VIPS came to be.

Extras 

Add-ons for VIPS.

libvips 

Quick introduction to the library.

nip2 

Quick overview of the graphical user interface.

TODO 

Stuff that's being planned for upcoming versions. Also bug reports and suggestions.

Benchmarks 

Results from the vips im_benchmark command.

Python 

About the Python interface.