Re: GD vs Imagick

Hi, Rasmus Schultz wrote:

The following GD issue is all-too common: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5773032/how-to-stop-gd2-from-washing-away-the-colors-upon-resizing-images Basically anyone who's ever accepted uploaded images and resized or converted them, has bumped into this. Only Imagick makes it possible to work around this issue, it's not possible with GD, at all - and the internal behavior of GD is arguably "wrong", as the visible output of simply opening and saving a JPEG image with GD is mangled with washed-out colors. I am starting to wonder why GD is the default in PHP? It's a pretty outdated library with a clunky API - we have Imagick with a much more concise API and a ton more useful features. Why is the less-capable image library the default on the PHP platform? Why not Imagick?

Imagick is, as others have pointed out, huge and internally messy. GD is at least smaller. There's also a benefit to having just the one extension for image handling by default, it prevents fragmentation. For all its problems, I feel we are better off trying to improve GD than we are trying to tame the monster that is Imagick and bundling it. -- Andrea Faulds https://ajf.me/