= imforger

== DESCRIPTION:

Imforger
[short for Image Forger, because we are making copies of images]

This class relies on the Imlib2 library to quickly convert between different file types, scaling and compressing on the way.

== FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

I have only tested this gem with Linux and Ruby 1.9+  See MAC
INSTALLATION instructions below.

Imlib2 drops the ICC profile and XMP tags when it creates the new image.  I have been using exiftool to copy the ICC profile and XMP tags over.  This is still much faster than ImageMagick et al.

== SYNOPSIS:

require 'imforger'
Imforger.new(input_file_path).to_file(output_file_path)

or:

Imforger.new(input_file_path).to_file(output_file_path, :width => 100,
:height => 100)

or:

Imforger.new(input_file_path).to_file(output_file_path, :maxwidth => 1000,
:maxheight => 1000, :format => 'tif')

See the test file for other examples.

== REQUIREMENTS:

Imlib2

== INSTALL:

gem install imforger

== SPEED:

The purpose of this gem is to scale images and save them out quickly.  ImageMagick was too slow and used too much memory.  [I didn't even bother frobnicating with RMagick.]  I include a benchmark that I used in the benchmark dir.  Results belew.  I also compared to the NetPBM library for good measure.

$ ruby benchmark/benchmark.rb

                  user     system      total        real
ImageMagick   0.000000   0.010000   1.710000 (  0.729113)
NetPBM        0.000000   0.000000   0.700000 (  0.391043)
Imforger      0.310000   0.010000   0.320000 (  0.321695)

Changing the input file size and format showed similar results: Imforger
is roughly twice as fast as calling out ImageMagick in realtime on a
dual-core laptop, and also
noticeably faster than NetPBM.  I don't include memory usage numbers
here, but anecdotally I did notice significantly less RAM usage with Imforger vs
ImageMagick.

== MAC INSTALLATION:

The following was contributed by jllamas.  This is how he got the gem
working on his Mac.

sudo port install imlib2
sudo port install freetype2
gem install imforger -- --with-opt-include=/opt/local/include --with-opt-lib=/opt/local/lib

== LICENSE:

See LICENSE.txt