How does libgd stack up against the competition?

Question

I'm curious as to what type of experiences people have had with libgd. I am looking for an alternative to GDI+ (something faster). I have tried ImageMagick, but can't get the performance out of it i need.

I have heard that ligd is fast, but less feature rich, and that ImageMagick is slow, but more feature rich.

I only need very simple image processing procedures (scale, crop) on a limited number of formats mainly jpg. However I need very high quality interpolation and it has to be fast (well faster than GDI+).

I am considering trying libgd does this seem like a good fit, given my requirements?

Answer 1

My own experiences with libgd are very good.

I've used it on a website where I'm taking jpeg images from disk, adding a text title to them, and rendering them back out, and it feels just about as fast as if the file was being served straight from disk.

Given that each time it's decoding the jpeg, altering it, and then re-encoding it, that's pretty good!