What is the best way to scale images in Java?

Question

I have a web application written in Java (Spring, Hibernate/JPA, Struts2) where users can upload images and store them in the file system. I would like to scale those images so that they are of a consistent size for display on the site. What libraries or built in functions will offer the best results? I will consider the following criteria in making my decision (in this order):

• Free/Open Source (essential)
• Easy to implement
• Quality of results
• Performance
• Size of executable

Answer 1

I would really recommend giving imgscalr a look.

It is released under an Apache 2 license, hosted on GitHub, been deployed in a handful of web applications already, has a very simple, but pedantically documented API, has code that works around 2 major image bugs in the JDK for you transparently that you'll only ever notice if you suddenly start getting "black" images after a scale operation or horrible-looking results, gives you the best possible looking results available in Java, is available via Maven as well as a ZIP and is just a single class.

Basic use looks like this:

BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(...); // load image
BufferedImage scaledImg = Scalr.resize(img, 320);

This is the simplest call where the library will make a best-guess at the quality, honor your image proportions, and fit the result within a 320x320 bounding box. NOTE, the bounding box is just the maximum W/H used, since your image proportions are honored, the resulting image would still honor that, say 320x200.

If you want to override the automatic mode and force it to give you the best-looking result and even apply a very mild anti-alias filter to the result so it looks even better (especially good for thumbnails), that call would look like:

BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(...); // load image
BufferedImage scaledImg = Scalr.resize(img, Method.QUALITY, 
                                       150, 100, Scalr.OP_ANTIALIAS);

These are all just examples, the API is broad and covers everything from super-simple use cases to very specialized. You can even pass in your own BufferedImageOps to be applied to the image (and the library automatically fixes the 6-year BufferedImageOp JDK bug for you!)

There is a lot more to scaling images in Java successfully than the library does for you, for example always keeping the image in one of the best supported RGB or ARGB image types while operating on it. Under the covers the Java2D image processing pipeline falls back to an inferior software pipeline if the image type used for any image operations is poorly supported.

If all that sounded like a lot of headaches, it sort of is... that's why I wrote the library and open-sourced it, so folks could just resize their images and move on with their lives without needing to worry about it.

Hope that helps.