librariesMagickCore

librariesMagickCore, commonly implemented as libMagickCore, is the core image processing library at the heart of the ImageMagick project. Implemented in C, librariesMagickCore provides the low-level data structures, algorithms, and utilities used to read, write, transform, and analyze images. It exposes a stable C API that is used directly by applications and indirectly by higher-level interfaces such as MagickWand and Magick++.

Core responsibilities include pixel access and manipulation, image caching, color management, and support for multiple color spaces and image channels. It handles image I/O through a modular delegate system, enabling support for many formats (such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and WebP) via optional libraries. Delegates can be extended to add new formats.

Performance and portability: librariesMagickCore is designed for efficiency and thread safety, with multi-threaded processing where available and platform abstractions for memory management and error handling. The library forms the backbone of ImageMagick's feature set, providing operations such as resize, crop, rotate, composite, and metadata manipulation.

Build, licensing, and ecosystem: librariesMagickCore is distributed as part of ImageMagick and is released under the Apache License 2.0 in recent releases; earlier versions used a different permissive license. The library is built as part of ImageMagick's build system (CMake in current releases) and interfaces with a range of format libraries such as libjpeg, libpng, libtiff, and others. Language bindings for librariesMagickCore exist through wrappers like MagickWand and Magick++ to enable use from other languages.