image-project

The image-project provides a high-performance system for image storage, metadata management, and processing (thumbnailing and tiling), optimized for large-scale image repositories.

Overview

The goal of this project is to provide a scalable and efficient way to store and serve images, with a focus on:

• Metadata Management: Flexible key/value pair storage for image metadata.
• High Performance: Native library integration (libvips) via JNA or Java's Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API.
• Memory Efficiency: Streaming-based image processing that avoids loading large images into Java heap memory.
• Tiling Support: Generation of GIS-compatible tile views for very large images.

Project Structure

This repository is organized into several modules:

image-service

The main Grails 6 web application. It provides the RESTful API for image upload, metadata management, and serves thumbnails and tiles. It also includes the base JNA-based integration for libvips.

image-utils

A shared Java 11 core library that defines the common interfaces (IImageThumbnailer, IImageTiler) and provides a baseline pure Java implementation for image processing.

image-utils-ffm-libvips

A high-performance image processing implementation using the Java FFM API (introduced in Java 22). It uses jextract-generated bindings for libvips.

image-service-photofox

An alternative FFM implementation that leverages the lopcode/vips-ffm library for a more idiomatic Java wrapper around libvips.

Building and Running

The root gradle project includes the image-utils and image-service modules. To build and run the image-service, follow the instructions in the image-service README.

The repo also includes nested gradle projects for:

• image-service-ffm-libvips - FFM-based implementation using jextract bindings for libvips
• image-service-photofox - FFM-based implementation using the lopcode/vips-ffm library

Both these modules require Java 22+ to build but currently the Grails 6 web application only supports Java 21.

To build the main projects:

./gradlew build

To build the FFM based submodules:

./gradlew :image-service-ffm-libvips:build
./gradlew :image-service-photofox:build

Dependencies

The native image processing implementations (JNA and FFM) require libvips to be installed on the host system.

• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install libvips-dev libvips-tools
• macOS: brew install vips

Deployment

The image-utils modules are designed to be extensible. The image-utils provides a Service Provider for loading the implementation at runtime. The image-service module is configured to include and use the JNA-based implementation by default.

Other image-utils clients can drop the image-utils-photofox module into the classpath and it will be found as the highest priority implementation by the service provider.

The image-utils-ffm-libvips module includes support for the Java 21 FFM preview, so it can be used in the image-service application if the image-service is run with the JVM enable preview flag switch on (e.g. --enable-preview). When present on the classpath the ffm-libvips implementation has a higher priority than the JNA-based implementation.