ImageIO FreeImage

Warning

This repo is licensed under the FreeImage Open Source Dual-License and not the typical BSD-2 license we use for everything else. Check out the LICENSE document in this repo and make sure you understand the consequences.

ImageIO FreeImage is a ImageIO plugin for the FreeImage library. In other words, it allows using FreeImage with ImageIO.

Installation

pip install imageio-freeimage
python -c "imageio.plugins.freeimage.download()"

Usage (and Examples)

To use it simply import the library. It will auto-register with ImageIO.

import imageio.v3 as iio
import imageio_freeimage

img = iio.imread("imageio:chelsea.png", plugin="PNG-FI")

Why ImageIO FreeImage

Based on discussions over at ImageIO's main repository, we have decided to spin out the FreeImage plugin. This was done for two reasons

1. It is/was unclear how permissible the FreeImage license is, how exactly it interacts with BSD (ImageIO's license), and what that means for downstream users who don't need FreeImage. Instead of having to deal with the fallout of this interaction, we decided to spin out the FreeImage plugin. This way, users don't have to worry, unless they explicitly need FreeImage, in which case they will likely be aware of how FreeImage is licensed, and what it means for their project.

2. The FreeImage bindings we provide are based on ctypes. In many cases this is not a problem; however, for some users it causes complications, because they, for example, use pypy or other non-cpython interpreters or they want to complile their python code in a browser via pyodide. Those use-cases are more prone to problems when ctypes are involved and having them in a dedicated optional dependency make this situation easier.

3. Having a dedicated repo for the FreeImage plugin will eventually allow us to install the FreeImage library at install time, instead of having to ask users to perform post-install steps to download the library. This might also have positive implications on platform availability and introspection as we can eventually compile FreeImage while building the package.