VIPS is an open source image processing software package.[2][3] It is particularly good with large images, works with multi-core processors, working with colour, scientific analysis and general research & development. It was developed during and is the product of several European research projects (VASARI, MARC, ACOHIR, Viseum) which were primarily about Imaging art,[4] but which demanded a new approach to image processing.
Compared to most image processing libraries VIPS needs little RAM and runs quickly, especially on machines with more than one CPU. This is primarily due to its architecture which automatically parallelises the image workflows.[5]
The software has two main parts: libvips is the image-processing library and nip2 is the graphical user-interface. The GUI aims to be about half-way between Photoshop and Excel. It is not designed for tasks such as retouching photographs, but more useful for the many other imaging tasks that programs like Photoshop are used for. Both work on Linux, Unix, Windows and Apple macOS (10.2 and later).[6]
VIPS is a standard package for many Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu.[7][8][9][10]