Build for Cygwin

This is much easier than building with mingw, but you won't get a native windows application you can distribute at the end of it.

Install Cygwin. Be careful to install Cygwin (and everything that you might need under Cygwin) in a path that does not contain any spaces (for example, avoid using Program Files).

Install a lot of required libs (keep adding them until configure runs cleanly). You need (at least):

libtiff
libpng
libmagick
libdpstk 

then:

./configure 
make
make install

should be it. Note that you need stable 7.10.21 or later.

Calling VIPS functions from your own code

If you want to use the VIPS library with some code that you are writing:

Set the two environment variables:

export VIPSHOME=/usr/local
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

You may want to add those commands to your profile (in ~/.profile). The following command will give you some information about the includes and libraries that you need to include:

pkg-config vips --cflags --libs

The Hello World page has some test code for checking your build system.

Have fun!