Windows Imaging Component (WIC) Plugin

[Rene Slijkhuis]

(08-14-2017, 04:18 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: Two questions:

1. Is it open source (and if so, where is the source?)
   
2. Since the plugin supports types that are supported natively by Gimp (GIF, JPG, PNG) which plugin is used when you open such files (from the file dialog in Gimp, or using "Open with Gimp" or somesuch in a files explorer)?
   

1. The binaries are now available without restrictions (public domain). I don’t have problems with releasing the source code also as public domain in the future. Before doing that I want to cleanup and document my build environment (since it was quite a challenge to setup a visual studio project that generates a GIMP plugin and uses low-level interfaces from both GIMP and Windows). When ready, I will probably use GitHub (or a similar service) for hosting the code.
   
   
2. You can always specify which plugin should be used, by manually selecting the file type in the “Open Image” dialog.
   
   By default GIMP automatically detects which plugin to use. I’m not familiar with the implementation of this mechanism. On my PC, it prefers the WIC plugin instead of the built-in JPEG plugin for jpg-files. The WIC plugin will use the JPEG codec that is shipped with Microsoft Windows.
   
   I can always change the WIC plugin depending on the feedback. Personally, I prefer to use the installed Windows Imaging codecs when using GIMP on Windows, but I’m eager to learn from other people here.