This is a reworking of nip2 for the gtk4 UI toolkit and the vips8 image processing library.

There's a news post on libvips.org with an introduction:

https://www.libvips.org/2025/03/20/introduction-to-nip4.html

If you used nip2, there's another post outlining the main changes in the new interface:

https://www.libvips.org/2025/03/12/nip4-for-nip2-users.html

Introduction

nip4 is a spreadsheet-like interface to the libvips image processing library. You create a set of formula connecting your objects together, and on a change nip4 will recalculate. Because nip4 uses libvips, it can process very large images, it recalculates quickly, and it only needs a little memory. It scales to fairly complex workflows: we have used it to develop systems with more than 10,000 cells, analyzing images totalling many hundreds of gigabytes.

nip4 can load all workspaces from nip2, the previous version of this program. It has a batch mode, so you can run any image processing system you develop from the command-line and without a GUI. It is purely functional, meaning there is no assignment and there are no side effects, and it is fully lazy, meaning all computation is driven by the user interface, down to the pixel level.

The CHARISMA workspace for museum technical imaging.

A 10,000 node workspace that computes per-voxel Patlaks from PET-CT scans.

Installing

Windows and macOS

Look in releases, pick a version, then download (for example) nip4-x64-9.1.5.zip to get version 9.1.5 for x64 windows.

Unzip somewhere and run bin/nip4.exe.

By default, nip4 uses Vulkan to draw the UI, and this can be a bit wonky on some older versions of Windows. If you see something like a blank window on startup, try:

> set GSK_RENDERER=cairo
> nip4

That will make it use a software only fallback to draw the UI and should work on any version of Windows, though it will be a bit slower.

macOS

You can install using homebrew with:

brew install nip4

ghostty has problems launching gtk applications, so you might need to use Terminal.app, or set XDG_DATA_DIRS by hand.

Linux-like systems with flatpak

Add flathub to your set of repositories:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Then install nip4 with:

flatpak install org.libvips.nip4

From source

Download the sources, then build and install with eg.:

cd nip4-x.y.x
meson setup build --prefix /my/install/prefix
cd build
meson compile
meson test
meson install

Check the output of meson setup carefully.

From source for Windows

Clone:

https://github.com/libvips/build-win64-mxe

Build with eg.:

$ ./build.sh --target x86_64-w64-mingw32.shared nip4

Build from source for flathub

Add the flathub repo, if you don't already have it:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Install the gtk4 SDK and runtime:

flatpak install org.gnome.Sdk//50
flatpak install org.gnome.Platform//50

Allow file. Recent security changes to git will cause submodule checkout to fail inside flatpak. If you get errors like fatal: transport 'file' not allowed, re-enable file transport with:

git config --global protocol.file.allow always

You need the latest flatpak-builder (the one in deb is not new enough), install with:

flatpak install org.flatpak.Builder

Build and try running it:

flatpak run org.flatpak.Builder --force-clean --user --install build-dir org.libvips.nip4.json
flatpak run org.libvips.nip4 ~/pics/k2.jpg

Force a complete redownload and rebuild (should only rarely be necessary) with:

rm -rf .flatpak-builder

Check the files that are in the flatpak you built with:

ls build-dir/files

Uninstall with:

flatpak uninstall nip4

Notes on flatpak build process

• niftiio is annoying to build, skip it.

Packaging for flathub

Install the appdata checker:

flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.appstream-glib
flatpak run org.freedesktop.appstream-glib validate org.libvips.nip4.metainfo.xml

Also:

desktop-file-validate org.libvips.nip4.desktop

Uploading to flathub

Make a PR on:

    https://github.com/flathub/org.libvips.nip4

then check the build status here:

    https://flathub.org/builds/#/apps/org.libvips.nip4

On success, merge to master.