Introduction

Meziantou.Framework.Imaging reads, writes, processes and draws images in .NET. It is written entirely in C#: it has no native dependency, so it runs the same way on Windows, Linux and macOS, on x64 and arm64, and in trimmed and NativeAOT applications.

What you can do with it

• Read and write images in PNG and animated PNG (APNG), GIF, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000, TIFF, BMP, TGA, QOI, Netpbm, ICO and CUR cursors, animated cursors (ANI) and OpenEXR. The format is detected from the content of the file, never from its extension. See Supported formats.
• Work with animations: GIF, APNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC and JPEG XL animations are loaded as full frames with their exact durations, and every operation applies to all the frames. See Images, frames and animations.
• Process images: crop, resize, rotate, flip, straighten a photo, correct a perspective, blur, sharpen, detect edges, adjust the colors, equalize the histogram, reduce to a palette or to black and white. See Processing.
• Draw: shapes and paths, gradients, images, patterns, shadows, masks, layers and filters, with antialiasing. See Drawing.
• Draw text from font files (TrueType, OpenType, WOFF and WOFF2): paragraphs, right-to-left and vertical text, text on a path, measuring. See Text.
• Manage colors and metadata: EXIF, XMP and ICC profiles are kept, orientation is applied on request, and colors are converted between ICC profiles explicitly. See Color.
• Process large inputs with bounded memory: read and write long animations one frame at a time, and protect your application from hostile files with resource limits. See Streaming readers and writers and Resource limits.

Principles

The library favors predictable results over guesses:

• Nothing is lost silently. Saving an image to a format that cannot store its transparency, its 16-bit precision, its animation or its metadata throws an exception, unless you say how to convert it. A JPEG never quietly becomes the first frame of an animation.
• An image is a list of full frames. Every frame of an animation is the complete picture shown at that time, and durations are exact fractions of a second. You never deal with the partial rectangles and disposal methods that the files store.
• You own what you create. Images are disposable; frames are views of their image. Loading a file never keeps the file or the stream open.
• Geometry changes are all or nothing. A crop, a resize or a rotation applies to every frame or, when it fails, leaves the image unchanged.
• Same input, same pixels. Decoding, processing and drawing give the same pixels on every platform and runtime.
• Errors are explicit. An unknown format, a corrupted file, an unsupported feature and an exceeded limit each throw a distinct exception. See Handling errors.

Namespaces

Next steps

• Getting started: install the package and write your first program.
• Guides: complete solutions to common tasks, such as thumbnails and format conversion.
• Limitations: what the library does not do.