The libvips image processing library

Libvips is an open source image processing library originally created for museum imaging projects through a range of EU-funded projects from 1989 onwards. The challenges of processing images which were much larger than available RAM as well as coping with multi-band multi-format pixels led to an extremely efficient software design. It also makes automatic use of multi-core CPUs. Today libvips is used by many websites due to its speed and low memory use (from Wikipedia to shopify and booking.com). It is OSS Fuzz tested by Google as it is classed as essential Internet software. It has been used in many museum imaging projects to stitch X-ray images and process massive scans (e.g. The battle of Murten 1.6 TerraPixel scan). Tiled pyramidal tiff images made for multi-resolution web-browsing are easily made and handled by libvips and its viewer vipsdisp. A spreadsheet-like GUI called nip is also useful for experimenting with image processing. These features make it a useful tool for processing images in the earth sciences, especially when sizes are larger than 32 GiB when most desktop or laptop computers struggle with typical software. Python can use the library (pyvips) which makes it easy to use with other tools but can also be used from C, C++, Ruby and Javascript.