lvandeve/lodepng

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

2340 stars · 460 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

LodePNG is a standalone PNG encoder and decoder written in C and C++ with no external dependencies, distributed as just two source files. It supports ANSI C (C89) as well as C++ with a convenience API, and is designed to be dropped directly into a project's source tree.

Use cases

• encode PNG images from raw pixel data in C or C++
• decode PNG files to raw pixel buffers without external libraries
• add PNG read/write support to a game or graphics engine
• convert images to and from PNG format in a portable tool
• embed PNG support in an embedded or dependency-free project

When to choose

• you need PNG support in C or C++ without pulling in libpng or other dependencies
• you want a simple two-file library you can vendor directly into your build
• you need both C89 and C++ APIs for the same functionality
• portability across compilers and platforms is a priority

When to avoid

• you need broad image format support beyond PNG (JPEG, WebP, etc.)
• you want hardware-accelerated or SIMD-optimized decoding for maximum throughput
• your project already depends on libpng or a larger multimedia framework
• you need advanced PNG features like APNG animation or extensive metadata handling

Facets

library · maturity stable

image-processing serialization image-processing graphics files cpp c cross-platform png encoder decoder header-only-style no-dependencies zlib-license

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