Use sharp or Pillow to process images

How to do it

Pillow 1.0 came out in July 2010, and 13.0.0 shipped on 16 October 2026. PyPI counted about 137 million downloads in the week to 20 October 2026. sharp first came out in August 2013 and wraps the libvips image library. It is still on version 0.35, so record it as an exception. Version 0.35.5 shipped on 27 September 2026, with about 71 million weekly npm downloads. By default sharp drops all metadata from its output and refuses inputs above 268,402,689 pixels. Set a lower limit and the steps as Rebuild every uploaded image says. Choose something else when Python must resize many large images on a small server. pyvips binds the same libvips, and 3.2.0 shipped on 29 August 2026, but it has about 260,000 weekly downloads.

Examples

JavaScript example

import assert from 'node:assert/strict';
import sharp from 'sharp';

export async function assertNoMetadata(rebuilt) {
  const { exif, xmp, iptc } = await sharp(rebuilt).metadata();
  assert.equal(exif ?? xmp ?? iptc, undefined);
}

Python example

from io import BytesIO
from PIL import Image

def assert_no_metadata(rebuilt: bytes) -> None:
    with Image.open(BytesIO(rebuilt)) as image:
        assert not image.getexif()

How to check

A test rebuilds a photo that carries GPS tags. The output has no EXIF data. The lock file holds one image library per language.

Sources

• sharp output options
• Pillow

Related rules

• Rebuild every uploaded image in API design