The recent PR #14877 [1] proposes to add the imagecompare gd function that mimics the gdImageCompare function from libgd. I always thought that a pixel-by-pixel matching function for two images was a big missing feature in PHP, as the corresponding userland implementation is really, REALLY slow.
The problem with gdImageCompare is that it checks several aspects of the two images, and fails on its core purpose. The behavior is better seen in its source code [2] rather than explained. I see the following problems: - The gdImageCompare is kind of buggy, as it completely disregards the alpha channel. As a user, I would expect that two images that have a pixel rgba(255, 0, 0, 100%) and one rgba(255, 0, 0, 50%) are considered different, but the current implementation reports them as identical. - Checking for bitmasks is cumbersome, and it requires 9 new constants in the global namespace (the IMG_CMP_*), which are nearly useless. Most use cases will just want to check for this: imagecompare($im1, $im2) & IMG_CMP_IMAGE. - The checks in gdImageCompare are also a bit arbitrary, why compare the interlace flag but not the palette order? Why check the number of colors in the palette if they are not even used in the image? - If a user is interested in the other checks, they can all be implemented in userland with existing functions: imageinterlace, imagecolortransparent, imageistruecolor, imagesx, imagesy, imagecolorstotal. I believe PHP should only offer required building blocks and leave to the libraries the implementation of more structured functionality. My proposal is a completely different function called imagematch() that solves the exact problem of the pixel-by-pixel matching, with the added value of optionally matching portions of the images, using the following signature: function imagematch(GdImage $image1, GdImage $image2, int $x1 = 0, int $y1 = 0, int $x2 = 0, int $y2 = 0, ?int $width = null, ?int $height = null): bool {} I already drafted PR #14914 [3] with the first two parameters. There is not an equivalent libgd implementation, so the implementation is entirely on the php side, but as you can see it's quite trivial. Even with the extended functionality of matching portions of the images it would be just a few extra lines of code, so not a big maintenance burden. If an RFC is required, I'm happy to redact it after the initial feedback round. [1] https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/14877 [2] https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/5586d0c7de00acbfb217e1c6321da918b96ef960/ext/gd/libgd/gd.c#L2834 [3] https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/14914