How can I resize an image using Java?

Question

FWIW I just released (Apache 2, hosted on GitHub) a simple image-scaling library for Java called imgscalr (available on Maven central).

The library implements a few different approaches to image-scaling (including Chris Campbell's incremental approach with a few minor enhancements) and will either pick the most optimal approach for you if you ask it to, or give you the fastest or best looking (if you ask for that).

Usage is dead-simple, just a bunch of static methods. The simplest use-case is:

BufferedImage scaledImage = Scalr.resize(myImage, 200);

All operations maintain the image's original proportions, so in this case you are asking imgscalr to resize your image within a bounds of 200 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall and by default it will automatically select the best-looking and fastest approach for that since it wasn't specified.

I realize on the outset this looks like self-promotion (it is), but I spent my fair share of time googling this exact same subject and kept coming up with different results/approaches/thoughts/suggestions and decided to sit down and write a simple implementation that would address that 80-85% use-cases where you have an image and probably want a thumbnail for it -- either as fast as possible or as good-looking as possible (for those that have tried, you'll notice doing a Graphics.drawImage even with BICUBIC interpolation to a small enough image, it still looks like garbage).

After loading the image you can try:

BufferedImage createResizedCopy(Image originalImage, 
            int scaledWidth, int scaledHeight, 
            boolean preserveAlpha)
    {
        System.out.println("resizing...");
        int imageType = preserveAlpha ? BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB : BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB;
        BufferedImage scaledBI = new BufferedImage(scaledWidth, scaledHeight, imageType);
        Graphics2D g = scaledBI.createGraphics();
        if (preserveAlpha) {
            g.setComposite(AlphaComposite.Src);
        }
        g.drawImage(originalImage, 0, 0, scaledWidth, scaledHeight, null); 
        g.dispose();
        return scaledBI;
    }

Thumbnailator is an open-source image resizing library for Java with a fluent interface, distributed under the MIT license.

I wrote this library because making high-quality thumbnails in Java can be surprisingly difficult, and the resulting code could be pretty messy. With Thumbnailator, it's possible to express fairly complicated tasks using a simple fluent API.

A simple example

For a simple example, taking a image and resizing it to 100 x 100 (preserving the aspect ratio of the original image), and saving it to an file can achieved in a single statement:

Thumbnails.of("path/to/image")
    .size(100, 100)
    .toFile("path/to/thumbnail");

An advanced example

Performing complex resizing tasks is simplified with Thumbnailator's fluent interface.

Let's suppose we want to do the following:

1. take the images in a directory and,
2. resize them to 100 x 100, with the aspect ratio of the original image,
3. save them all to JPEGs with quality settings of 0.85,
4. where the file names are taken from the original with thumbnail. appended to the beginning

Translated to Thumbnailator, we'd be able to perform the above with the following:

Thumbnails.of(new File("path/to/directory").listFiles())
    .size(100, 100)
    .outputFormat("JPEG")
    .outputQuality(0.85)
    .toFiles(Rename.PREFIX_DOT_THUMBNAIL);

A note about image quality and speed

This library also uses the progressive bilinear scaling method highlighted in Filthy Rich Clients by Chet Haase and Romain Guy in order to generate high-quality thumbnails while ensuring acceptable runtime performance.

You don't need a library to do this. You can do it with Java itself.

Chris Campbell has an excellent and detailed write-up on scaling images - see this article.

Chet Haase and Romain Guy also have a detailed and very informative write-up of image scaling in their book, Filthy Rich Clients.