Image, an updated version of the Go standard image libraries

This package supports reading and writing image metadata. This ranges from things as simple as comment blocks in GIF files to ICC color profiles and XMP data.

Code can set limits on the amount of wall time or memory that encoding or decoding an image can use, which allows code to read files with more safety guarantees than the standard library.

A new, unified API exists that allows access to the image metadata, control over encoding and decoding, and the writing of image files with metadata.

The existing API has been maintained for drop-in compatibility with the current standard library.

Image files may be read in without decoding the actual image data, and these deferred images may be written out without incurring the expense and potential image loss of decoding or encoding them. This is useful for code which only wants to examine image metadata, but it also allows programs that want to mutate an image's metadata without mutating the image itself to do so inexpensively and without altering image quality.

This is especially useful for lossy image formats such as jpeg -- deferred image reading and writing allows programs to update jpeg metadata without having to re-encode the image.