Possible to consider other image handling crates for cosmic applcations?

[Quackdoc]

While image-rs is the go to for general image handling within rust projects, it's not the only one. Zune-image is another library that abstracts image decoding of multiple formats. To get a good coverage of image codecs, using multiple may be necessary. a brief overview of some of the issues current crates have

• zune-image

  • lacks any support for GIF, AVIF and Webp as well as some less common formats.
  • it also has a policy of only accepting decoders written in rust which may prove troublesome to support formats like webp, a VVC based image format should one exit, (it will eventually) as well as HEIF. unless rust native decoders are made for them. (AVIF has a rust native decoder but it remains to be seen if they are willing to accept one, asked here Image Format Issue Tracker. etemesi254/zune-image#102)
  • mostly just zune-* formats

• image-rs

  • Support for AVIF and Webp is extremely limited, many images will not render correctly.
  • Missing any support for jpeg-xl in the short term is not willing to accept one due to this issue Policy on formats with paywalled specifications image-rs/image#1979

• ril

  • only supports a couple image formats, but within that is full support via libwebp (vendored build) and claims to have plans for doing a native rust webp decoder in the future

There are other crates too if we leave the native rust world.

magick-rust is rough around the edges but it could be used to decode images, since it's a binding to imagemagick it has great support, far greater then any rust native library, however it's fairly obtuse to use.

ffmpeg-* crates, there are plenty of ffmpeg crates, linking against ffmpeg has historically been a hassle, and ffmpeg has a hard resolution limit on images limiting support. However ffmpeg is pretty much guaranteed to be available on most distros.

It may also be possible and perhaps most wanted to simply make a simple shim crate which can fill the gaps and implement a image-rs like API so it would be a mostly drop in place solution.