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This is a reworking ofnip2 for the gtk4UI 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 thenew interface:

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

nip4 is a spreadsheet-like interface to thelibvips image processinglibrary.You create a set of formula connecting your objects together, and on a changenip4 will recalculate. Because nip4 uses libvips as the image processing engineit 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 withmore than 10,000 cells, analyzing images of many tens of gigabytes.

nip4 can load all workspaces from nip2, the previous version of this program.It has a batch mode, so you can run any image processing system you developfrom the command-line and without a GUI. It is purely functional, meaningthere is no assignment and there are no side effects, and it is fully lazy, meaningall computation is driven by the user interface, down to the pixel level.

The CHARISMA workspace for museum technical imaging.

A 10,000 node workspace that computes per-voxel Patlaks from PET-CT scans.

There's a zip for each version on thereleasespage. Downloadnip4-x86_64-9.0.11.zip, unzip somewhere, and runbin/nip4.exe.

nip4 is inhomebrew, so just:

brew install nip4

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

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

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

cd nip4-x.y.xmeson setup build --prefix /my/install/prefixcd buildmeson compilemeson testmeson install

Check the output ofmeson setup carefully.

Clone:

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

Build with eg.:

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

Add theflathub 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//49flatpak install org.gnome.Platform//49

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

git config --global protocol.file.allow always

You need the latestflatpak-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.jsonflatpak 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

• niftiio is annoying to build, skip it.

• we skip imagemagick as well, too huge

Install the appdata checker:

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

Also:

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

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.