# SmartImage 0.0.3 - simple yet powerful cross-platform thumbnail generation and image manipulation i

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/smartimage-0-0-3-simple-yet-powerful-cross-platform-thumbnail-generation-and-image-manipulation-i/190990>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [July 2, 2010, 1:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/smartimage-0-0-3-simple-yet-powerful-cross-platform-thumbnail-generation-and-image-manipulation-i/190990 "2010-07-02T01:26:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![murfhy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@murfhy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/murfhy)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2010, 1:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/smartimage-0-0-3-simple-yet-powerful-cross-platform-thumbnail-generation-and-image-manipulation-i/190990/1 "2010-07-02T01:26:51Z")

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“It’s like a Swiss Army Knife for images, but one of those tiny ones you  
can  
keep on your keychain”

SmartImage is an image processing/compositing/thumbnailing Ruby with the  
following design goals:

- Completely seamless installation and usage across all Ruby  
implementations, with an emphasis on MRI and JRuby
- Expose a small but powerful and easy-to-understand API
- Easy to extend with support for multiple image compositing backends  
(presently RMagick and Java Graphics2D)

That’s cool, so what can it do?

- Create thumbnails (even in your Ruby on Rails application!)
- Scale images
- Composite multiple images into a single image
- Convert between various image formats (.png, .jpg, and .gif  
presently  
supported)
- Apply alpha masks to an image

Why should I use SmartImage instead of RMagick, ImageScience, etc?

- You want a more powerful library than ImageScience
- You want a library with a less mind-bogglingly bloated API than  
RMagick
- You’re considering a move to an alternative Ruby implementation  
like  
JRuby and want an image library that works seamlessly between MRI,  
JRuby,  
and other Ruby implementations

–

v0.0.3 release notes:

As part of keeping with its commitment to seamless support for multiple  
Ruby  
implementations, SmartImage 0.0.3 fixes some minor incompatibilities  
with  
JRuby 1.5.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![murfhy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@murfhy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/murfhy)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2010, 1:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/smartimage-0-0-3-simple-yet-powerful-cross-platform-thumbnail-generation-and-image-manipulation-i/190990/2 "2010-07-02T01:28:37Z")

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Mea culpa, forgot to include a link. SmartImage is available via  
[RubyGems.org](http://RubyGems.org):

gem install smartimage

or on Github:

[GitHub - tarcieri/SmartImage: It's like a Swiss Army Knife for images, but one of those tiny ones you can keep on your keychain](http://github.com/tarcieri/SmartImage)