VIPS For Linux

VIPS is an open source, multiplatform and free command-line software implemented in C/C++/Python and designed from the ground up to provide users with a free image processing system.

While VIPS will not be able to help you retouch photographs, it will however help you to manipulate images in many other ways. It handles very large images and comprises of the nip2 graphical user interface (GUI) and the libvips library, which is used for processing images.

Key features include support for image files that are larger than the amount of RAM your computer has, support for many CPUs, distributed as part of the PARSEC suite, support for colour, support for scientific analysis and support for general development and research.

The software supports JPEG, PNG and TIFF images, supports various scientific formats, including Matlab, Radiance, FITS, PFM, OpenSlide and Analyze. It is low on resources and extremely fast when compared to other image processing software.

While the libvips library can be used from several programming languages, including C, C++, Ruby, Python or JavaScript, it can also be used from the command-line. Its graphical user interface, nip2, includes several interesting features and looks quite modern.

Another interesting feature is that the Wikipedia website uses the VIPS library for image resizing. The popular Booking.com website also uses VIPS to process hotel images.

Looking under the hood of VIPS, we can notice that the application has been written in the C, C++ and Python programming languages, which means that it is very fast. The software has been successfully tested with the GNU/Linux, BSD, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It’s compatible with computers supporting either of the 32-bit or 64-bit instruction set architectures.