A quick lookup for a term, an error string, or an authoritative source. This page is organised in three parts: glossary, error-message index, and external resources.
| Term |
Definition |
| libvips |
A high-performance image processing library written in C, able to process very large images in memory through lazy evaluation and a thread pool. |
| ImageRef |
govips’ cgo handle owning a libvips VipsImage*; must be released manually with Close(). |
| multi-page / pages |
Models GIF, animations, PDF, and multi-page TIFF as pages; n=1 takes only the first page, n=-1 takes all. |
| NumPages |
govips import parameter controlling how many pages are read. |
| toilet-roll |
The visual of an animation’s frames misaligned after a transform such as resize or rotate. |
| ICC profile |
A colour-characteristic file for consistent colour reproduction across devices and colour spaces. |
| CMYK |
The cyan/magenta/yellow/black ink-channel representation, not a direct colour like RGB. |
| StripMetadata |
Whether metadata is stripped on export; defaults to false. |
| EXIF / IPTC |
Textual metadata embedded in an image (e.g. camera info, copyright). |
| alpha |
The fourth channel governing transparency. |
| side-effect import |
Importing a package solely to trigger its init() registration, e.g. _ "image/png". |
| comparison-pending |
Another binding has not yet been validated by the shared runner; its defaults are not asserted. |
| Error |
Meaning and where to debug |
image: unknown format |
Missing Go side-effect import, or libvips has no native loader. → missing-codec |
xxx_save not found |
libvips is too old or was built without that native save op. → missing-codec, install-failures |
bad grid geometry |
Whole-image operation on an animation without loading all pages. → animation-multi-page |
Wrong JPEG library version |
Compile-time and runtime libjpeg versions conflict. → install-failures |
| Segfault / SIGSEGV |
Sharing an ImageRef across goroutines or closing a source object too early. → concurrency-safety |
| Growing RSS |
Unclosed ImageRefs, fragmentation, or cache warm-up. → memory-leak |
GIF Quality has no effect |
Native gifsave has no Quality parameter. → gif-quality |
| WebP drops ICC |
A known boundary that may need a workaround. → colour-shift |
- Term definitions defer to the official source; this page is a fast index only.
- The error-message index points to the matching debugging page in this handbook; see those pages for details.
