Compared to most image processing libraries VIPS needs little RAM and runs quickly, especially on machines with more than one CPU.

There are many architectural elements which give VIPS its speed[12] including its lack of locks and ability to overlap input and output.

Most images start as three bytes per pixel (RGB) but when processing VIPS will upsize the elements to 16, 32 or 64 bits each if necessary to avoid clipping/rounding errors.

Its demand-driven design means that, for example, a very large intermediate image may not be fully calculated if the output target requires just a small part of it.

VASARI[14] was an EU-funded research project to build a system capable of measuring long-term colour change in old master paintings.

A suitable image processing library which could handle the data size needed could not be found, so custom one was developed.

Machines of the time were very modest by today's standards: a Sun workstation cost £40,000, had 64MB of RAM and ran at 25 MHz, so this was quite a challenge.

Kirk had developed simple but fast C libraries during his PhD which worked on memory-mapped "framestores" for video processing.

At the National Gallery, John Cupitt wrote a GUI called "vf" in SunView, Sun's graphical environment.

This aimed to use the imaging techniques developed in VASARI to build a colorimetric camera and to use it to print an art catalogue.

Recent additions have been support for Analyze, DICOM3, FITS, Matlab and Radiance images, run-time code generation, and the start of a move to a GObject foundation.

This speeds up and extends image handling compared to previously used software and hence saves processor time on the busy systems.