OpenImageIO

[Stéfan van der Walt]

Hi Zach

2009/10/5 Zachary Pincus <zachary.pincus at yale.edu>:
>
>> You spent some time writing a replacement IO reader in pure Python, if
>> I recall correctly; did you have any practically usable results?

[...]

> That is, I think that one could write simple PNG and TIFF decoders
> (which do not support all the corners of the spec, but neither do
> those in the PIL) in pure python / numpy in a day or so. This would be
> useful for many people, but lacking jpeg would be a big issue. Perhaps
> we could grab just the C core of some jpeg decoder/encoder somewhere
> and use that?

libjpeg and libpng are both fairly easy to wrap with a couple of
cython / ctypes calls, so I might just do that at a next sprint.

Looking back at this conversation, I believe a plugin system would be
a practical solution that can be implemented right away.  For example:
plugins (be it for PIL, CVD, Magick, etc.) are asked to load an image.
 If a plugin fails because the format is not supported, it raises a
FormatError and the next plugin is used.

WIth a plugin system in place, we can later replace as much of the
functionality under the hood as we want, while having developed a
consistent interface that can be exposed to the user right away (via
imread).

Let me know your thoughts.

Regards
Stéfan