I'm replying here to let Melraidin (who posted a sibling comment) know that their account is dead, for reasons I can't understand since their comments seem helpful.

Totally agree, I've used it for some projects as well. The only thing I wasn't able to grok (which still kills me to this day), was that I couldn't get it to handle EPS files correctly. If anybody has done that with VIPS/IM, I would love to hear about it.

Performace is the reason why we switched from ImageMagick

VIPS has been great to work with. The docs are generally very good and the performance has been great. The author (https://github.com/jcupitt/) has always been responsive to issues and questions and seems to be constantly working on the project.

My only, relatively minor quibble, is dev work happening on master, but when it's largely a one-man project who am I to judge. So far we haven't come across any problems that weren't either self-inflicted or already fixed in master.