libimago

Overview

Imago is a simple C library for reading and writing images in many different image file formats.

Currently supported file formats:

• PNG (requires libpng).
• JPEG (requires libjpeg).
• Targa: 24bit or 32bit, raw, or RLE compressed.
• Portable PixMap (PPM), and Portable GreyMap (PGM).
• Radiance shared exponent HDR (RGBE).
• LBM: InterLeaved BitMap (ILBM), and Planar BitMap (PBM).

License

Copyright (C) 2010-2025 John Tsiombikas nuclear@mutantstargoat.com

You may freely use, modify and/or redistribute libimago, under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3 (or at your option, any later version published by the Free Software Foundation). See COPYING and COPYING.LESSER for details.

Download

Latest release: http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/libimago/files/libimago-2.3.tar.gz

Grab the source code from github: https://github.com/jtsiomb/libimago

Web site: http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/libimago

Usage example

Check out the example program under test/, and the heavily commented imago2.h header file, to find out how to use libimago.

The simplest way to load image data in RGBA 32bit is:

int width, height;
unsigned char *pixels = img_load_pixels("foo.png", &width, &height, IMG_FMT_RGBA32);
img_free_pixels(pixels);

To load image data in the closest possible format to whatever is natively stored in each particular image file, use:

struct img_pixmap img;
img_init(&img);
img_load(&img, "foo.png");
/* use img.fmt to determine the actual pixel format we got */
img_destroy(&img);

There's also an optional interface for loading an image and creating an OpenGL texture out of it in a single call:

unsigned int texture = img_gltexture_load("foo.png");

Build

To build and install imago2 on UNIX run:

./configure
make
make install

If you wish to avoid the libpng or libjpeg dependencies, you may disable support for these formats by passing --disable-png or --disable-jpeg to configure.

To build on windows just use msys2/mingw32 and follow the UNIX instructions.

To cross-compile for windows with mingw-w64, try the following incantation:

./configure --prefix=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32
make CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc AR=i686-w64-mingw32-ar sys=MINGW32
make install sys=MINGW32