createImageBitmap

[sandstrom]

Description

Iron out the problems surrounding createImageBitmap.

Background

createImageBitmap has been around for a while, but the implementations has several flaws, around image quality, EXIF handling, handling of color spaces, etc. These issues makes the API difficult to use in practice.

A few examples of API use-cases:

• Extract sprites from a sprite sheet
• Take snapshots from a video feed
• Resize images on-device before uploading to a server (for example from <input capture…)
  • On-device image resize is quite tricky, with the only work-arounds being complicated canvas use, which often will run into limitations, for example iOS canvas memory limits.
• Crop images on-device
• Take non-rotated image pixels with an associated EXIF tag and output rotated pixels (without any EXIF), or put differently strip EXIF and apply rotation to image data.
  • This is useful since many server-side systems prefer to handle all images without accompanying exif rotation data.

Problem

Copied below are a few examples of browser bugs. These are not the only issues, but should give a few examples.

I think if all the issues around this method could be ironed out, it would enable a lot of great utility! But right now, it isn't quite there.

Specification

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/imagebitmap-and-animations.html

Additional Signals

Can I Use

https://caniuse.com/createimagebitmap

Browser bugs

A few examples from the three top browser engines:

Chromium

• https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41409681
• https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40773069
• https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41468523

Firefox

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677739
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1363861
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1797567
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1189634
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1818824

Safari

• https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202458
• https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=234920
• https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237895