nip4 --- a user interface for libvips

This is a reworking of nip2 for the gtk4 UI toolkit and the vips8 image processing library.

There's a news post on libvips.org with an introduction:

https://www.libvips.org/2025/03/20/introduction-to-nip4.html

If you used nip2, there's another post outlining the main changes in the new interface:

https://www.libvips.org/2025/03/12/nip4-for-nip2-users.html

nip4 is a spreadsheet-like interface to the libvips image processing library. You create a set of formula connecting your objects together, and on a change nip4 will recalculate. Because nip4 uses libvips as the image processing engine it can handle very large images, recalculates quickly, and only needs a little memory. It scales to fairly complex workflows: I've used it to develop systems with more than 10,000 cells, analyzing images of many tens of gigabytes.

It has a batch mode, so you can run any image processing system you develop from the command-line and without a GUI.

Installing

Windows

There's a zip for each version on the releases page. Download nip4-x86_64-9.0.11.zip, unzip somewhere, and run bin/nip4.exe.

macOS

nip4 is in homebrew, so just:

brew install nip4

The not-yet-released libvips 8.18 has some performance improvements that help nip4 image rendering a lot. Until 8.18 is released, experts can patch their homebrew install for a good speedup.

Linux-like systems with flatpak

Add flathub to your set of repositories:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Then install nip4 with:

flatpak install org.libvips.nip4

From source

Download the sources, then build and install with eg.:

cd nip4-x.y.x
meson setup build --prefix /my/install/prefix
cd build
meson compile
meson test
meson install

Check the output of meson setup carefully.

From source for Windows

Clone:

https://github.com/libvips/build-win64-mxe

Build with eg.:

$ ./build.sh --target x86_64-w64-mingw32.shared --nightly nip4

Build from source for flathub

Add the flathub repo, if you don't already have it:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Install the gtk4 SDK and runtime:

flatpak install org.gnome.Sdk//48
flatpak install org.gnome.Platform//48

Allow file. Recent security changes to git will cause submodule checkout to fail inside flatpak. If you get errors like fatal: transport 'file' not allowed, re-enable file transport with:

git config --global protocol.file.allow always

You need the latest flatpak-builder (the one in deb is not new enough), install with:

flatpak install org.flatpak.Builder

Build and try running it:

flatpak run org.flatpak.Builder --force-clean --user --install build-dir org.libvips.nip4.json
flatpak run org.libvips.nip4 ~/pics/k2.jpg

Force a complete redownload and rebuild (should only rarely be necessary) with:

rm -rf .flatpak-builder

Check the files that are in the flatpak you built with:

ls build-dir/files

Uninstall with:

flatpak uninstall nip4

Notes on flatpak build process

• niftiio is annoying to build, skip it.

• we skip imagemagick as well, too huge

Packaging for flathub

Install the appdata checker:

flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.appstream-glib
flatpak run org.freedesktop.appstream-glib validate org.libvips.nip4.metainfo.xml

Also:

desktop-file-validate org.libvips.nip4.desktop

Uploading to flathub

Make a PR on:

    https://github.com/flathub/org.libvips.nip4

then check the build status here:

    https://flathub.org/builds/#/apps/org.libvips.nip4

On success, merge to master.