[4RealFreedom]

Read through the comments and was surprised no one mentioned libvips - https://github.com/libvips/libvips. At my current small company we were trying to allow image uploads and started with imagemagick but certain images took too long to process and we were looking for faster alternatives. It's a great tool with minimum overhead. For video thumbnails, we use ffmpeg which is really heavy. We off-load video thumbnail generation to a queue. We've had great luck with these tools.

[gh123man]

+1 to vips! It's amazingly fast and stable. I even wrote (some minimal) Swift bindings for it to be used with a Swift backend: https://github.com/gh123man/SwiftVips

[gopher_space]

Thanks for the suggestion, and Meson keeps popping up.

I vaguely remember flattening images in some manner so imagemagick wouldn't choke. Something about setting key tones? It's been a while.

[4RealFreedom]

Didn't know if you were asking but Meson is used to build libvips from source. It took a couple days for me to get up to speed on it but wasn't difficult to understand. https://mesonbuild.com/ https://www.libvips.org/install.html As for imagemagick, I just couldn't get the speed I wanted out of it. This is partly due to the fact that the system I was building allows many different image types. I want to say gifs were almost always an issue but I'm reaching here. Been a bit for me as well.

[gopher_space]

Yep, I keep wondering why I'm not just using make and a text editor on a lot of projects, but make feels old and creaky for some unexamined reason so I'm looking around.

One of the major lessons I pulled out of that time is that most library authors will happily fix bugs or add features if you give them money. You can also just ask them to sell you a different license if FOSS ruins your plan.