While the project seems dead, the last version 2.0.35 was released in 2007, its development is came alive again by some PHP project developers, led by  Pierre Joye and Ondřej Surý.

Most of the new features from the PHP bundled version were merged. PHP 5.5 now uses a early version 2.1.0 (-alpha).

This reworking allows to have nearly (99%) the same features with the system library or the bundled one (imageantialias is the only missing function with the system version).

A lot of cleanups and changes in this new version.

See : API changes/compatibility report for the GD library

You will notice the removal of internal functions, which have no reason to be exposed:

  • gdGet*, gdPut*, gdSeek, gdTell
  • Putchar, Putword
  • gdCacheCreate, gdCacheDelete, gdCacheGet

And the addition of a lot of new functions:

  • gdAffine*
  • gdImageBmp*
  • gdImageClone
  • gdImageCrop
  • gdImageFlip*
  • gdImageScale
  • gdImageWebp*
  • etc

Especially, you will notice the new WebP image format which is also available from PHP (imagefromwebp and imagewebp).

For applications using this library, a simple rebuild should be enough.

This new version will be available in Fedora 20 and so, used by PHP 5.5 (fixing a very old bundled library exception). The gd-last package allows to use it with older Fedora version and with Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS...).