Node.js: image resizing without ImageMagick

Question

I'm developing a web app on Node.js (+ express 4) where users can set their profile image by uploading it to the server. We already limit the file mimetype and max filesize, so the user can't upload more than 200KB png or jpeg images.

The problem is we'd like to resize (serverside) the uploaded image resolution to 200x200 to improve page loading and saving space on disk. After some research, all answers pointed to using any module based on ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick.

However, having to install ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick to do a simple image resizing seems too overkill for me, so, is there any other solution other than this for Node.js?

Edit: I've changed the accepted solution to sharp as the previous solution (lwip) is no longer maintained. Thanks for all your feedback!

Answer 1

I would vote for sharp:

sharp('input.jpg')
  .resize(200, 200)
  .toFile('ouput.jpg', function(err) {
    // output.jpg is a 200 pixels wide and 200 pixels high image
    // containing a scaled and cropped version of input.jpg
  });

It's fast, typically 6x faster than the fastest imagemagick-based node bindings, and runs in very little memory, perhaps 10x less. sharp links to the libvips image library directly, there is no shelling out to an external program, and the library itself is faster and more efficient than *magick at this task. It supports useful things like stream, buffer and filesystem input and output, colour management, transparency, promises, overlays, WebP, SVG, and more.

As of sharp 0.20, npm will automatically download complete pre-compiled binaries on most platforms, so there's no need for node-gyp. Just enter:

npm install sharp

or:

yarn add sharp

And off you go.