The VIPS image processing system is a very fast, multi-threaded image processing library with low memory needs. And it really is pretty fast, the perfect thing for rokka and we'll be transitioning to using it soon.
Fortunately, there's a PHP extension for VIPS and a set of classes for easier access to the VIPS methods. So I started to write a VIPS adapter for Imagine and came quite far in the last few days. Big thanks to the maintainer of VIPS John Cupitt, who helped me with some obstacles I encountered and even fixed some issues I found in a very short time.
So, without much further ado I present imagine-vips, a VIPS adapter for Imagine. I won't bore you with how to install and use it, it's all described on the GitHub repo.
There is still some functionality missing (see the README for details), but the most important operations (at least for us) are implemented. One thing which will be hard to implement correctly are Layers. Currently the library just loads the first image in for example an animated gif. Not sure, we will ever add that functionality, since libvips can't write those gifs anyway. But with some fallback to imagick or gd, it would nevertheless be possible.
The other thing not really well tested yet (but we're on it) are images with ICC colour profiles. Proper support is coming.
As VIPS is not really something installed on many servers, I don't expect a huge demand on this package, but it may be of use for someone, so we open sourced this with joy. Did I say, that it's really fast? And maybe someone finds some well hidden bugs or extends it to make it even more useful. Patches and reports are of course always welcome.