What's new in 8.3

Yet another vips has appeared, it's now 8.3. Source tarballs plus a Windows binary are in the supported area of the vips website, homebrew on OS X should update soon.

New image loaders

This has been blogged about before, but the code is now ready to use. libvips used to use ImageMagick to load GIF, SVG and PDF images, it now has its own loaders which are usually a lot quicker.

Better and faster image shrinking

This has been talked about during development, but it's now finished and ready for use. Image downsizing should be about twice as fast, and quality should be noticeably better.

Better vipsthumbnail

The vipsthumbnail command-line image shrinker knows about the new loaders and about the new image shrinking code, and can put them together to get, at least in some cases, a really good speed improvement.

Other

There are a lot of small improvements. Check the ChangeLog for a more detailed summary.