Using libvips as an alternative to ImageMagick

November 11, 2017 Jari Lehtinen Tech

I have been using ImageMagick to resize large images into thumbnails as long as I remember.

Few weeks ago I encountered a server issue where several convert processes consumed most of the server's memory and things went haywire.

I started to look for alternatives: better performing image resizing software which consumes less processing power and memory.

Performance testing

I found a repository called speedtest-resize which compares various image resize algorithms.

I took few large images and converted them to 4 different sized thumbnails using fastjpeg and libvips, repeated the process 100 times and measured the time taken.

libvips is over 50% faster

I did not expect the difference to be that big, but libvips performed approximately 50-60% faster than ImageMagick - no matter what I threw at it. If you do some other adjustments besides resizing, you might lose some features over ImageMagick.

Using libvips

Using libvips's vipsthumbnail command is easy:

vipsthumbnail source.jpg -s 100x100 -o output.jpg[Q=90,optimize_coding,strip]

-s [width]x[height] Output image target width and height
-o path Output image file path
Q=n Image quality/compression (n = 1-100, default 75)
optimize_coding Turns on the libjpeg's coding optimizer^[1]
strip Strips all the metadata from the image

Conclusion

If you do a lot of server-side image resizing, I recommend you give libvips a try. It's faster – a lot faster.

Notes