PixTrim is a minimal, privacy-focused image processing tool.

It runs in the browser and handles common tasks like compression, resizing, format conversion (AVIF, WebP, HEIC, PNG, JPEG), as well as cropping, flipping, and rotating.

The backend is powered by Go and libvips.

Would love to hear feedback from HN.

Great article! super helpful for someone like me who recently started building services in Go.

I especially appreciated the section on slog.Attr and the !BADKEY issue, it’s one of those little things that can go unnoticed until logs break in prod.

Thanks for putting this together!

I ran into the same issue when working with image processing in Go using libvips. By default, libvips ignores EXIF orientation too, so I had to explicitly read and apply the orientation tag before doing any resize or crop. Otherwise users ended up with upside-down processed images from photos. Glad to see this is getting better in Rust.

Hello, libvips author here, the JPEG loader has a flag to do this for you. You can write:

VipsImage *image = vips_image_new_from_file("something.jpg", "autorotate", TRUE, NULL);

and it'll flip it upright for you and remove any EXIF orientation tag. It isn't the default since it has (obviously) a large memory and cpu cost.

For simple resize and crop it's much better to use the exif tag to adjust the resize and crop parameters (the vipsthumbnail command does this).

Thanks so much for the clarification and for the great work on libvips!

In my Go project I’m using the Golang library github.com/davidbyttow/govips/v2.

Images are loaded via `vips.NewImageFromFile()`, which internally calls `vips_image_new_from_file()`. However, `NewImageFromFile()` doesn't support any flags or options beyond the image path, so for JPEGs I manually call `AutoRotate()` before resizing, which wraps `vips_autorot()` — and that works well.

Thanks again!

Ah no problem! I'm glad it's useful.

`govips` was a pretty early binding and wasn't really done the libvips way. It doesn't expose all the operations or options, it's mostly done by hand, and there are a number of leaks and misfeatures.

It's been replaced by `vipsgen`:

https://github.com/cshum/vipsgen

Which is an automatically generated 100% binding. It should have the complete API, it should be very stable and leak-free, and it should be simple to maintain.

`autorot` is pretty expensive. You'll see much better performance if you flip x and y in your crop instead.

Thanks a lot! I really appreciate the detailed reply and the recommendation!

I wasn’t aware of `vipsgen`, but it looks great — full coverage and auto-generated bindings are exactly what I’ll be missing in `govips` if the project grows (I hope it will). I’ll definitely give it a try and see how it works.

Also, great tip on avoiding `autorot` by flipping crop coordinates — I hadn’t thought of that! Thanks again for your help!