ol.vips

Clojure bindings for libvips image processing library

ol.vips is a Clojure library for loading, transforming, and saving images with libvips. Use it to build thumbnails and responsive image variants, convert formats, crop and resize uploads, compose images, read and write metadata, and run image pipelines from files, byte arrays, or streams.

If you have never used libvips before: it is a native image processing library designed for fast, memory-efficient image work. ol.vips gives Clojure programs access to that engine with a Clojure-first API, generated wrappers for the full libvips operation surface, and platform-native jars so you can use libvips from the JVM without building the native integration yourself.

ol.vips uses coffi and requires Java 22+ for FFI/FFM (Project Panama).

Project status: Experimental.

It is used in production, but needs more exercise and feedback from the community before I commit to a stable version.

Installation

Install the main library plus exactly one native jar that matches your target platform.

;; deps.edn
{:deps {com.outskirtslabs/vips {:git/url "https://github.com/outskirtslabs/vips.git"
                                :git/sha "46789851fa8d749517bb7e09ea4e7340e1b757ec"}
        ;; change the following based on your runtime platform
        com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-linux-x86-64-gnu {:mvn/version "1.2.4-1"}}}

Don’t forget to run clojure -X:deps prep before first use if using the git coord.

Choose one or more native artifacts (only the appropriate one for the runtime platform will be used):

com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-linux-x86-64-gnu
com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-linux-x86-64-musl
com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-linux-aarch64-gnu
com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-linux-aarch64-musl
com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-macos-x86-64
com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-macos-aarch64
com.outskirtslabs/vips-native-win32-x86-64

ol.vips requires Java 22+ and native access enabled for the JVM process:

;; deps.edn
{:aliases
 {:dev {:jvm-opts ["--enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED"]}}}

To use your own libvips build, see Loading the native library.

Quick Start

(require '[ol.vips :as v]
         '[ol.vips.operations :as ops])

(v/init!)

(with-open [thumb   (ops/thumbnail "dev/rabbit.jpg" 300 {:auto-rotate true})
            rotated (ops/rotate thumb 90.0)]
  (v/write-to-file rotated "thumbnail.jpg")
  (v/metadata rotated))
;; => {:width 300, :height 242, :bands 3, :has-alpha? false}

The top-level ol.vips namespace provides the image loading, saving, metadata, and convenience helpers. ol.vips.operations contains generated wrappers for libvips operations.

Documentation

Licensing

The platform-native companion jars under native/ redistribute upstream sharp-libvips binary bundles. Those redistributed native binaries are licensed separately from the ol.vips source, principally under LGPL-3.0-or-later.