This is a Ruby binding for the Blurhash library. With it you can encode an image as a small string that can be saved in the database, returned in API responses, and displayed as a blurred preview before the real image loads.

Blurhash is written by Dag Ågren.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'blurhash'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install blurhash

To generate the blurhash string from an image file, you need to read in the image pixel data yourself, for example with RMagick:

require 'blurhash'
require 'rmagick'

image = Magick::ImageList.new('foo.png')

puts Blurhash.encode(image.columns, image.rows, image.export_pixels)

To display the visual component once you have the blurhash string, you need another library in JavaScript, Swift, Kotlin and so on. Fore more information, see the original blurhash repository.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/Gargron/blurhash. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Blurhash project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.