Supported
This is the current supported version of vips. Check the documentation page. We have a special page for What's New in 8.4 in headline form. We have a detailed VIPS ChangeLog and nip2 ChangeLog.
VIPS comes as part of many popular versions of Unix. If you're running Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Arch Linux or RedHat check your package manager and click install. The links page has details on how to find the packages if you have trouble.
If you need a more recent version and you are using a Debian-based linux, such as Ubuntu, Dariusz Duma has a useful PPA of updated packages related to photography. Add that PPA and the latest vips should appear in your package manager.
Alessandro Tagliapietra maintains an Heroku buildpack for libvips and its dependencies. Marc Bachmann maintains a Dockerfile for libvips.
Lovell Fuller maintains a script which will automatically build and install the latest version of libvips on many platforms, including RHEL, Amazon Linux, and others. See the repository for sharp, the node.js libvips binding.
If all else fails, libvips is easy to build from source. Download sources from the supported download page and check the notes below.
There's a windows installer, called typically nip2-8.x.x-setup.zip in the supported download page.
nip2 has some problems with UTF-8 and filename encoding conversions at the moment. If you have problems loading files, try checking for accented characters in filenames.
You need vips-dev-8.x.x.zip in the supported download page. This has a complete set of headers and DLLs for vips and all of the libraries it needs.
There are other zips you can use to build a complete vips system from source, check the Build on windows page.
This tiny test program:
#include <iostream>
#include <vips/vips>
int
main( int argc, char **argv )
{
/* Check arguments.
*/
if( argc != 3 ) {
std::cerr << "usage: " << argv[0] << " infile outfile\n";
exit( 1 );
}
try {
vips::VImage fred( argv[1] );
fred.invert().write( argv[2] );
}
catch( vips::VError e ) {
e.perror( argv[0] );
}
return( 0 );
}
Compiles and links on Windows with this ugly command-line:
i686-w64-mingw32-g++ \
-mms-bitfields -march=i686 \
-I.../vips-dev-7.40.4/include \
-I.../vips-dev-7.40.4/include/glib-2.0 \
-I.../vips-dev-7.40.4/lib/glib-2.0/include \
hello.cc \
-L.../vips-dev-7.40.4/lib \
-lvipsCC -lvips -lgsf-1 -lz -ljpeg -lxml2 -lfftw3 -lm \
-lMagickWand-6.Q16 -llcms2 \
-lopenslide -lcfitsio -lpangoft2-1.0 -ltiff -lpng14 -lexif \
-lMagickCore-6.Q16 -lpango-1.0 -lfreetype -lfontconfig -lgobject-2.0 \
-lgmodule-2.0 -lgthread-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -lintl \
-o hello.exe
On linux/osx you can use pkg-config and it's just:
g++ hello.cc `pkg-config vipsCC --cflags --libs`
The homebrew package is usually most up to date. There are packages for fink and macports as well. See Build on OS X for hints on building yourself.
Go to the supported download page and grab the latest nip2-8.x.x.tar.gz and vips-8.x.x.tar.gz. See the READMEs in the packages for build and install notes, but generally the usual ./configure ; make ; sudo make install will work, provided you have all the development packages installed.
For example, most systems will come with the glib runtime, but will not include all of the header files you need to compile programs that use glib. On Debian-family systems the glib runtime is in a package called libglib2.0-0 but the headers (development files) are in a package called libglib2.0-dev.
Install -dev versions of packages until configure runs cleanly, then try make; sudo make install. When configure finishes it prints a summary of the packages it found and what components it will build. Look at the list carefully and make sure everything you need is there.