Side note the image-rs crate in the Rust ecosystem has no external dependencies and can encode and decode animated gifs and a variety of other image formats, 100% rust https://github.com/image-rs/image. At my startup we use this in a lambda to process user-uploaded images, with great success.
The image-rs crate has some serious design flaws and it has put me off trying to do any image processing in Rust at all. It may support many formats, but the basic image type is complete garbage. It’s conceptually a 2D array of some specific pixel type—which means that any pixel value must carry with it colorspace information. I can’t honestly recommend it to anyone.
The issues I’m talking about are acknowledged as design flaws / mistakes if you start browsing the GitHub issues.
Sounds like typical Rust... They're well-meaning people in general, but they usually lack domain knowledge in the particular field they're trying to reinvent in Rust, so the end result often looks like a square-shaped wheel.
Glad it worked out for you—it seemed like the features are there for basic image conversion, but try to do something a little more sophisticated and you run into some severe design limits. Here is the kind of underlying problem I’m talking about:
Why would you do something more sophisticated though, versus just using your own pixel data structures and the converting if/when you want to load/save. This is supposed to be a stand-in for image magic, not a panacea for doing image processing in Rust. Maybe start an image-processing crate if that is your interest?
