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VIPS HandbookVIPS Handbook

VIPS Handbook

One mental model for libvips and four widely used interfaces.
Start hereInstall and verify

Maintained by WebP Cloud. This is a community project, not official libvips documentation. Bootstrap pages marked as drafts still require technical verification and human approval.

Start with the job

Section titled “Start with the job”

Understand the ecosystem

See where libvips, its CLI, and language bindings each fit.

Read and convert

Build a complete flow for decoding, processing, encoding, and handling errors.

Transform geometry

Learn the boundaries between resize, crop, rotate, and flip operations.

Adjust colour

Keep colour-space conversion separate from brightness, saturation, and hue.

First executed evidence

Section titled “First executed evidence”
Gate of the Orient outlined in red lights above a park walkway at night
Project-owned input1938 × 1292 JPEG
A 640-pixel WebP thumbnail of the night scene generated by govips
Executed govips output640 × 427 WebP, quality 82

This is an executed, versioned output from the displayed Go example rather than a decorative mockup. Open the 15-minute quickstart for the code, parameters, and current verification boundary.

Four first-class interfaces

Section titled “Four first-class interfaces”
  • govips for Go services that can manage CGO, libvips lifecycle, and resource release.
  • sharp for Node.js services built around image pipelines.
  • pyvips for Python automation, research, and service workloads.
  • vips CLI for operation discovery, shell batches, and minimal reproductions.