About this plugin
Indigit Imagination is a free WordPress plugin that uses libvips as a local image processing backend through the WP_Image_Editor API.
It supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, and TIFF.
All image processing is performed locally on your server. No API key, account, external service, or cloud processing is required.
Indigit Imagination is completely free for any use, including commercial use. There are no ads, tracking, or data collection.
Requirements
Indigit Imagination needs three things on your server:
- PHP 7.4 or newer.
- The PHP FFI extension, with ffi.enable set to true.
- libvips 8.12 or newer installed as a system library.
The FFI setting must allow FFI use by the PHP SAPI that runs WordPress. enable=preload setting restricts FFI usage and is not sufficient for Indigit Imagination.
libvips must also be available to the PHP environment used by WordPress, such as PHP-FPM. Having libvips available only to the command-line PHP environment is not sufficient.
Indigit Imagination has been tested only on Linux.
These requirements make Indigit Imagination unsuitable for most shared hosting environments, where users cannot change PHP configuration or install system libraries. Ask your hosting provider whether the required configuration is available.
If the requirements are not met, Indigit Imagination is not used. WordPress keeps using another available image editor, such as Imagick or GD. Nothing breaks.
Go to Tools > Site Health, click the Info tab, and find the Indigit Imagination section. It shows whether the requirements are met and the detected server configuration.
Settings
Settings > Indigit Imagination has these options:
- Resampling kernel: Linear (default) or Lanczos3
- Big image threshold
- Metadata: strip all, keep all, or keep only the color profile
- Process all uploads on the server instead of in the browser (WordPress 7.1 and newer)
- Error log for support requests (off by default)
Privacy
Indigit Imagination does not connect to any external service.
The plugin does not make remote requests and does not send images, metadata, diagnostic information, or other data to an external server.
The plugin stores its settings in the options table. The error log is off by default. When you turn it on, it keeps the last 10 image errors on your site.
jpg or <path>. Turning the log off deletes it.
Included Libraries
The following libraries are included with Indigit Imagination. Their namespaces are prefixed where applicable to avoid conflicts with other WordPress plugins:
- php-vips by John Cupitt, MIT License
- PSR Log, MIT License
- Composer Installers, MIT License
1-or-later.
Performance
Indigit Imagination uses libvips for image processing. The libvips project publishes benchmarks covering image-processing performance, memory usage, and multithreading:
- libvips Benchmarks
- Speed and memory use
These benchmarks are performed using specific workloads and hardware and should not be treated as a performance guarantee for a particular WordPress installation.
Source Code
The source code and the build steps are on GitHub.