So for a project I'm working on I need to be able to read in the rgba data from an openexr hdr image file (and possibly write to them as well). My issue is that the ilmimf library from the openEXR website is quite large and I do not need all of the functionality it offers. So I don't want to include it and have it blow up the size of my project.
So is there a (relatively) simple way to write an independent custom read/write algorithm or if there is one on the web can someone point me in the right direction? I can't really seem to find anything other than the official library to use.
OpenEXR file format is quite complex and the official library is a well written and tested library. It's not a good idea to write custom code because you will not reached the same quality standard as OpenEXR.
You can disable some features using
./configure --disable-FEATUREbefore compilation. If you are in a environment with very few memory you can manually remove code frome the library but doing this introduce the risk of adding bugs.