GD vs Imagick - Externals

6 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

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2017-08-15 12:52 GMT+02:00 Rasmus Schultz <rasmus@mindplay.dk

Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform? Why
not Imagick?

Most likely because no one have come fourth and attempted to push it
into core and have been willing to do all the work required for it.

As for GD, I would argue and say that for the average developer
needing image functionality, it fits the needs, the API is clunky yes
and I have been wanting to redesign at least the PHP binding for quite
some time, but that is a huge task, for a marginally small gain imo.

If you are willing to do the work, and work together with the
maintainer of Imagick, then I don't see any showstoppers for why it
can't be included in the php-src through an RFC much like Sodium
recently was added to 7.2

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

6 years ago by Dan Ackroyd — view source

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the maintainer of Imagick,

Hey, that's me!

and work together with the maintainer of Imagick,

Actually, it would be lovely if anyone contributed to Imagick.

I've been the maintainer of the extension for a little over three
years and have spent a significant amount of time:

increasing the test coverage.
working with the ImageMagick guys upstream to fix memory access issues.
porting the extension to PHP 7.
extending the extension to compile against both ImageMagick 6 and 7.
adding to the documentation in the PHP manual
creating a site that has working examples http://phpimagick.com/

In that time, other than minor bug fixes there have been almost no
contributions from other people.

then I don't see any showstoppers for why it

There are some serious downsides to shipping Imagick with PHP.

Imagick is a thin wrapper around the ImageMagick library, as
opposed to full-fledeged api to an external service, like PDO is. This
means Imagick is only guaranteed to work with the version of
ImageMagick it was compiled against.

This is also true of GD, but we ship the GD library as part of PHP src.

We would need to either also ship the ImageMagick source with PHP, or
people would need to recompile PHP whenever they upgraded the
ImageMagick library. Either of those choices would more exciting than
hoped for.

Releasing Imagick with PHP means that the release cycles would need
to be sync'ed. This has proven to be inconvenient in the past when an
extension has wanted to change the api, but was forced to wait due to
needed to wait for the next minor/major version of PHP.
There are significant chunks of work that ought to be done for a
version 4 of Imagick, that probably ought to be done before thinking
about bringing it in as a core extension. The two main things that
spring to mind are:

i) The code that allows iterating over Imagick objects that contain
multiple images is just bogus, and doesn't do what anyone would expect
it to do. Just removing the iterating, and making people explicitly
access images inside an Imagick object, is probably the right thing to
do, but obviously a major breaking change.
https://github.com/mkoppanen/imagick/issues/122

ii) A significant amount of functionality was added to ImageMagick 7.
Exposing this functionality through Imagick is going to take quite a
bit of work, and may result in some breaking changes.

There are probably other issues, but those are the big ones I can
think of right now.

To summarise, even if it is a good idea to ship Imagick as a core
extension, it will take a significant portion of time to make it
happen.

Some what ironically I have never used Imagick in production, so
I've been maintaining a reasonably large code base for no personal
benefit, other than the 'glory' of being an open source maintainer*.
I've already been thinking of ways to remedy that, but that is a
discussion for another day.

While I'm working a full time job, I wouldn't be able to commit to
spending anything close to the amount of time required to do this.
No-one else has touched the source code in multiple years, and aren't
up-to-speed with what is happening in the ImageMagick 6 -> 7
migration, so the first steps to even consider moving Imagick to be a
core extension would either be:

i) Someone else step up and start helping with maintaining Imagick and
then in a few months have them look at the work required.

ii) Finding a company/someone to hire me for the multiple months
required to get Imagick into a position where it would be conceivable
to ship it as a core extension.

cheers
Dan
Ack

my landlord does not accept 'open source glory' in lieu of rent payment.
Also, a related tweet - https://twitter.com/MrDanack/status/895797231923671040

6 years ago by Kris Craig — view source

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Releasing Imagick with PHP means that the release cycles would need

to be sync'ed. This has proven to be inconvenient in the past when an
extension has wanted to change the api, but was forced to wait due to
needed to wait for the next minor/major version of PHP.

Why would they need to be synced? When PHP releases a new version, can't
we just bundle the latest Imagick build and plug into that?

Sure, having them in sync would yield certain benefits, but none of them
appear to be deal-breakers to me. Or am I just missing something?

--Kris

6 years ago by Rasmus Schultz — view source

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Yeah, I keep thinking about this.

I'm not sure there's a really good reason why PHP shouldn't come with
best-in-class image support, if it's available - which it sounds like it
is; libvips looks more modern, lower memory and CPU overhead, better
overall really, and appears to be stable and up-to-date?

Yeah, it has dependencies. Doesn't everything? Does it matter, as long as
they're bundled?

Releasing Imagick with PHP means that the release cycles would need

to be sync'ed. This has proven to be inconvenient in the past when an
extension has wanted to change the api, but was forced to wait due to
needed to wait for the next minor/major version of PHP.

Why would they need to be synced? When PHP releases a new version, can't
we just bundle the latest Imagick build and plug into that?

Sure, having them in sync would yield certain benefits, but none of them
appear to be deal-breakers to me. Or am I just missing something?

--Kris

6 years ago by Dan Ackroyd — view source

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Why would they need to be synced?

Currently Imagick can have a single branch. Commits to that branch are
made and then for the next release, we can determine if it needs to be
a major minor or patch release based on the changes.

People are then free to upgrade to the next version of Imagick at
their own leisure. Or not if they don't feel like it.

If it was shipped as part of PHP it would need to have:

One branch for each version of PHP supported. Which for now is 5.6,
7.0, 7.1, 7.2 and 7.next

Each commit to Imagick would need to be evaluated for whether it
should be brought to those branches.

Additionally we would probably need to have an additional branch for
BC breaking stuff to do in, to await PHP 8.

Not only would this be a maintenance burden for the developers, it
would also be an arse for end-users.

"Oh, you want to upgrade to PHP 7.3? Then you also need to upgrade
Imagick, even though you'd prefer to keep to the current version, as
it works fine for you."

"Oh, you want the new version of Imagick that has a BC breaking change
in it? Well sorry, you'll need to wait for PHP 8 for that."

cheers
Dan

6 years ago by Dan Ackroyd — view source

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Actually, it would be lovely if anyone contributed to Imagick.

So far, no volunteers. :-p

As well as the documentation that are open, this bug:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=73840

Is one that doesn't require any knowledge of ImageMagick....it's a
purely PHP problem.

cheers
Dan

6 years ago by Derick Rethans — view source

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The following GD issue is all-too common:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5773032/how-to-stop-gd2-from-washing-away-the-colors-upon-resizing-images

Basically anyone who's ever accepted uploaded images and resized or
converted them, has bumped into this.

Only Imagick makes it possible to work around this issue, it's not possible
with GD, at all - and the internal behavior of GD is arguably "wrong", as
the visible output of simply opening and saving a JPEG image with GD is
mangled with washed-out colors.

I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP?

The GD library is bundled with PHP, and hence easy to always made
available. Imagick is an external library, so we can't have this on by
default.

Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform?
Why not Imagick?

I wouldn't say any is the default though...

cheers,
Derick

6 years ago by Christoph M. Becker — view source

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The following GD issue is all-too common:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5773032/how-to-stop-gd2-from-washing-away-the-colors-upon-resizing-images

Basically anyone who's ever accepted uploaded images and resized or
converted them, has bumped into this.

Only Imagick makes it possible to work around this issue, it's not possible
with GD, at all - and the internal behavior of GD is arguably "wrong", as
the visible output of simply opening and saving a JPEG image with GD is
mangled with washed-out colors.

Indeed, GD completely ignores and forgets color profile information when
loading an image, and thus doesn't write it back on saving. See
https://github.com/libgd/libgd/issues/136.

However, as workaround it would be possible to read the color profile by
other means and to re-apply it after the image has been saved.

For simple JPEG to JPEG resizing lossless JPEG transformations would be
even more suitable (see https://github.com/libgd/libgd/issues/343) – I
don't know whether this is already supported by Imagick or Gmagick.

I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP?

It's a pretty outdated library with a clunky API - we have Imagick with a
much more concise API and a ton more useful features.

Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform? Why
not Imagick?

This is most likely for historic reasons. In the years libgd was
basically unmaintained, PHP developed the bundled libgd further, and
most of that was later back-ported to libgd. Furthermore most current
maintainers of libgd are also guys with a php.net account – so there's
some bond.

--
Christoph M. Becker

6 years ago by S.A.N — view source

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2017-08-15 13:52 GMT+03:00 Rasmus Schultz rasmus@mindplay.dk:

The following GD issue is all-too common:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5773032/how-to-stop-gd2-from-washing-away-the-colors-upon-resizing-images

Basically anyone who's ever accepted uploaded images and resized or
converted them, has bumped into this.

Only Imagick makes it possible to work around this issue, it's not possible
with GD, at all - and the internal behavior of GD is arguably "wrong", as
the visible output of simply opening and saving a JPEG image with GD is
mangled with washed-out colors.

I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP?

It's a pretty outdated library with a clunky API - we have Imagick with a
much more concise API and a ton more useful features.

Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform? Why
not Imagick?

Imagick - unsafe, slow and requires many external dependencies.

Now there are much better modules:
Vips - safe, much faster (7x) requires little dependency.
http://pecl.php.net/package/vips

It's better to spend your time on Vips , instead of having an Imagick
Thank.

6 years ago by Remi Collet — view source

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Le 15/08/2017 à 12:52, Rasmus Schultz a écrit :

I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP?

Don't really know, perhaps because the first one ?

But we have various alternatives:

imagick
gmagick
vips
(perhaps others)

And ImageMagick is really an ugly upstream

most common commit message is "..." [1]
unstable API
(imagick extension even check that build version === runtime versions)
soname bump in patch version (yes, really, when 4th digit change)
lack of CI
(else I don't understand how they can release with broken tests [2])

And about extensions:

imagick conflicts with gmagick (as GraphicMagick is a fork of
ImageMagick, you cannot load both in the same process), so having
imagick the default one will kill gmagick.

[1] https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/commits/master
[2]
https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue%20is%3Aclosed%20author%3Aremicollet%20

6 years ago by Pierre Joye — view source

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hi Rasmus,

The following GD issue is all-too common:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5773032/how-to-stop-gd2-from-washing-away-the-colors-upon-resizing-images

Basically anyone who's ever accepted uploaded images and resized or
converted them, has bumped into this.

Only Imagick makes it possible to work around this issue, it's not possible
with GD, at all - and the internal behavior of GD is arguably "wrong", as
the visible output of simply opening and saving a JPEG image with GD is
mangled with washed-out colors.

I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP?

It's a pretty outdated library with a clunky API - we have Imagick with a
much more concise API and a ton more useful features.

I disagree here, as old functions are old fashioned, new ones are easy
to understand and to use. Not OO, but that's a little details (contrib
welcome). And I disagree with outdated as well. It is focused on
easiness and most common usages. More features make it depending on
the requests or available time to actually add them. Performance wise
it is also similar to similar actions.

Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform? Why
not Imagick?

Imagick is good, but it is a huge library, by its size, features, code
base (external) and complexity. I would never ever recommend to have
it bundled or even less by default.

In any cases, both libraries (or the bindings) welcome contributors,
you are more than welcome too :)

Cheers,

Pierre

@pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org

6 years ago by Rasmus Schultz — view source

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Thank you all for considering the subject and contributing your thoughts.

I understand why Imagick is not attractive as a standard module (even
according to the maintainer) since we can't feasible bundle all it's
dependencies, so I suppose that's a no-go.

The libvips module does in deed look interesting. I suppose this would have
all the same problems though? Lots of dependencies.

So GD wins perhaps mostly because it's small and has fewer dependencies.

Color profiles in my experience are pretty common though - and currently
(silently) leads to mangled images with GD.

I've seen a work-around, as somebody mentioned, which involves parsing the
binary contents of JPEG files, extracting the color profile and injecting
it into a JPEG file after GD has saved it - this is (A) horrible in terms
of memory and CPU usage, and (B) not what most users are going to want in
the first place; you most likely want color profiles moved, which is better
in terms of browser compatibility and performance when delivering images
over the web. So this is not a good work-around.

I wanted to contribute to Intervention Image - a library that abstracts GD
and Imagick behind a common API, but it turns out, this can't be
implemented with GD in PHP, except of course resorting to approaches like
pixel-by-pixel manipulation, for which PHP is totally unsuitable.

Ideally, I think that GD should be fixed, since it's the default (by which
I mean, it's the only option on a standard PHP install) so that libraries
like Intervention Image can deliver predictable results.

I'm not a C developer though, so I can't help with that.

hi Rasmus,

On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 5:52 PM, Rasmus Schultz rasmus@mindplay.dk
wrote:

The following GD issue is all-too common:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5773032/how-to-stop-
gd2-from-washing-away-the-colors-upon-resizing-images

Basically anyone who's ever accepted uploaded images and resized or
converted them, has bumped into this.

Only Imagick makes it possible to work around this issue, it's not
possible
with GD, at all - and the internal behavior of GD is arguably "wrong", as
the visible output of simply opening and saving a JPEG image with GD is
mangled with washed-out colors.

I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP?

It's a pretty outdated library with a clunky API - we have Imagick with a
much more concise API and a ton more useful features.

I disagree here, as old functions are old fashioned, new ones are easy
to understand and to use. Not OO, but that's a little details (contrib
welcome). And I disagree with outdated as well. It is focused on
easiness and most common usages. More features make it depending on
the requests or available time to actually add them. Performance wise
it is also similar to similar actions.

Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform?
Why
not Imagick?

Imagick is good, but it is a huge library, by its size, features, code
base (external) and complexity. I would never ever recommend to have
it bundled or even less by default.

In any cases, both libraries (or the bindings) welcome contributors,
you are more than welcome too :)

Cheers,

Pierre

@pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org

6 years ago by Thomas Hruska — view source

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I'm not a C developer though, so I can't help with that.

The world's core software runs on C. PHP is also written in C. You
can't develop extensions for PHP unless you know C. Developing userland
applications in PHP is a lot easier when you know how to deep dive into
PHP's source code because you can know precisely what each option will
do even if the public documentation is a bit sparse in places. Those
are several reasons to start learning C even if you don't use it in your
day-to-day development efforts. A whole world of possibilities opens up
when you learn C and you'll be a more well-rounded software developer too.

--
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President

I've got great, time saving software that you will find useful.

http://cubiclesoft.com/

And once you find my software useful:

http://cubiclesoft.com/donate/

6 years ago by Christoph M. Becker — view source

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The libvips module does in deed look interesting. I suppose this would have
all the same problems though? Lots of dependencies.

So GD wins perhaps mostly because it's small and has fewer dependencies.

I'm not sure about that. If GD is to be built with the full feature
set, it needs libgpng, libjpeg, libwebp, libxpm, libtiff, libfreetype
and libfontconfig. Basically, only the GIF and BMP stuff are
implemented by libgd itself.

Ideally, I think that GD should be fixed, since it's the default (by which
I mean, it's the only option on a standard PHP install) so that libraries
like Intervention Image can deliver predictable results.

I don't think that anybody disagrees with this, but it's simply a matter
of man power. Also note, that storing the color profiles when reading
an image would cause an ABI break, so that can't happen in 2.2.x, but
would have to wait for 2.3, which might be far away.

--
Christoph M. Becker

6 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source

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Hi,

Rasmus Schultz wrote:

The following GD issue is all-too common:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5773032/how-to-stop-gd2-from-washing-away-the-colors-upon-resizing-images

Basically anyone who's ever accepted uploaded images and resized or
converted them, has bumped into this.

Only Imagick makes it possible to work around this issue, it's not possible
with GD, at all - and the internal behavior of GD is arguably "wrong", as
the visible output of simply opening and saving a JPEG image with GD is
mangled with washed-out colors.

I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP?

It's a pretty outdated library with a clunky API - we have Imagick with a
much more concise API and a ton more useful features.

Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform? Why
not Imagick?

Imagick is, as others have pointed out, huge and internally messy. GD is
at least smaller. There's also a benefit to having just the one
extension for image handling by default, it prevents fragmentation.

For all its problems, I feel we are better off trying to improve GD than
we are trying to tame the monster that is Imagick and bundling it.

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/