GD is an open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers.
GD is written in C, and "wrappers" are available for Perl, PHP and other languages. GD can read and write many different image formats. GD is commonly used to generate charts, graphics, thumbnails, and most anything else, on the fly.
The most common applications of GD involve website development, although it can be used with any standalone application!
The library was originally developed by Thomas Boutell and is now maintained by many contributors (see the CONTRIBUTORS file) under the umbrella of PHP.net.
If you like to contribute, report bugs, see how to contribute document
For security related issues, please contact us at [email protected]
Please visit our homepage for more details.
GD has builtin support for:
It also has optional support for more formats via external libraries:
- JPEG via IJG/libjpeg or libjpeg-turbo
- Does not include JPEG 2000
- PNG via libpng
- TIFF via libtiff
- WebP via libwebp
- XPM via libXpm
Besides that, GD depends on some external libraries, which are all optional and disabled by default:
- FreeType for rendering fonts
- Fontconfig for configuring and customizing font access
- libraqm for complex text layout
- libimagequant for conversion of RGBA images to 8-bit indexed-color images
- NOTE libimagequant is dual-licensed: GPLv3 and commercial license