[Image-SIG] Yet another image processing library

[David Goldsmith]

Thanks, John, very helpful.  (FTR: in my case, it was a rhetorical question because, into the foreseeable future, I'm Windows-bound, but it was a helpful synopsis and hopefully others will fill find it so also.  Thanks again!)

DG
--- On Wed, 10/8/08, jcupitt at gmail.com <jcupitt at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: jcupitt at gmail.com <jcupitt at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Image-SIG] Yet another image processing library
> To: d_l_goldsmith at yahoo.com
> Cc: image-sig at python.org
> Date: Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 1:33 AM
> 2008/10/8 David Goldsmith <d_l_goldsmith at yahoo.com>:
> > How "PIL-like" is your Python API?
> 
> The 'Python' page on our website has some sample
> code comparing PIL and vips:
> 
> http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Python#Speed_and_memory_use
> 
> So it's broadly similar. I suppose someone could write
> a wrapper class
> that makes vips look more like PIL, but I don't think
> 100%
> compatibility is possible, since vips has (almost) no
> destructive
> operations.
> 
> I think the big differences are:
> 
> * vips should be quicker, especially if you have more than
> one CPU
> core or you're working on large images, though it does
> depend on what
> operations you use and what image format you work in
> * vips can process larger images and needs less memory
> * vips is more flexible in the range of image formats
> available: vips
> images are width, height, bands, format and that's it,
> there's no RGB
> mode or greyscale mode or alpha channel or anything like
> that
> * vips can handle metadata like ICC profiles and EXIF data
> * vips has a larger range of operations available (I think)
> * vips is almost all C/C++, so it's harder to extend or
> modify from Python
> * vips has (almost) no destructive operations: unlike PIL,
> you can't
> modify images, you can only make new images (most
> demand-driven image
> processing systems are like this, it makes caching and
> parallelism
> much easier)
> * PIL has a more 'natural' Python interface
> * vips has a GUI you can use to experiment with (nip2),
> though it's
> rather an odd one
> 
> John