Updating progress after a long time. With the new release, Vix is at v0.10.0 now. It has few significant additions, which I think worth sharing.

v0.10.0

• Experimental support for streaming. User can read or write images without keeping the complete image in memory. See Vix.Vips.Image.new_from_enum/1 and Vix.Vips.Image.write_to_stream/2
• Efficient interoperability (zero-copy) with other libraries such as Nx, eVision. See Vix.Vips.Image.new_from_binary/5 and Vix.Vips.Image.write_to_tensor/1

See release changelog for more details.

Other changes include support for foreign operations, copying as formatted binary, updating image metadata etc. With this, almost all major libvips functionality can be accessed in Elixir (If you think something is missing, please let me know).

I like to thank @kip for his recent contributions to Vix and encouragement

Should I use Vix or Image?

Vix tries to be close to libvips interface to support a large set of use cases. Because of this, doing some basic image operation might feel unintuitive. Image by @kip is an excellent library, which builds on top of Vix and provides more elixir friendly wrapper functions for common operations along with many additional features such handling Exif, Math operators, and more. And all of this is accompanied by good documentation. So for most of the users, using Vix via Image might be better choice.

Hi all, sharing update since there are major changes since the last update.

Vix now supports prebuilt NIF and libvips binaries. This should solve all the hiccups users used to face when using Vix. Issues such as installing correct libvips version, compiler tooling, libvips dependencies, compiler flags etc. With release v0.16.0 you don’t have to install anything, just add {vix, "0.16.0"} and forget about it. This should also make using Vix in Livebook or script more straight forward. Pre-built binaries are managed using cc_precompiler. This is a breaking change if you depend on an operation which is not present in the prebuilt binary, please check release docs for more details.

Other major changes

Image now implement Access behavior in a manner similar Nx.Tensor. You can use it to access pixel data from in a more intuitive way.

{:ok, img} = Image.new_from_file("./test/images/puppies.jpg")

# Extract an image band
red = img[0]

# Slices the top left 10x10 pixels of the image
# and returns all bands.
top_left = img[[0..9, 0..9,]]

# Returns an image that slices a 10x10 pixel square
# from the top left of the image with three bands
area = img[[0..9, 0..9, 0..3]]

# Slices the bottom right 10x10 pixels of the image
# and returns all bands.
bottom_right = img[[width: -10..-1, height: -10..-1]]

See document for more details. Thanks to @kip for this contribution.

Vix Image now implements Kino.Render protocol, so we can use it livebook with image preview out of the box.

Screenshot 2023-02-03 at 8.00.55 PM1908×1152 90.3 KB

Screenshot 2023-02-03 at 8.01.04 PM1870×1210 84 KB

Thanks to all contributors and open source libraries on which Vix is based on.

• @kip for multiple contributions
• prebuilt libvips binaries is based on excellent work being done on Sharp: GitHub - lovell/sharp-libvips: Packaging scripts to prebuild libvips and its dependencies - you're probably looking for https://github.com/lovell/sharp
• cc_precompiler by @cocoa

Congratulations @akash-akya, a great update and definitely excited to use this especially with Livebook. Been working with Vix for over a year now and never had a segfault or a memory leak, just great performance, low memory usage and good fun.