I appreciate the thought, but when we rewrote our image formatter in 2017, it was to resolve a number of issues that XenForo's image manager still seems to ignore:
- vulnerability to image decompression bombs (
VWE-2017-3979). At the time this was being exploited on wikis in the wild. So yeah, can't switch to a library now that has no protection. Adequate protection requires manually stepping through the image binary data to make sure the data is safe before handing it off to Imagick or GD.
- loss of copyright metadata after manipulating an image (more
here). Again, adequate protection requires manually stepping through the image binary data to locate the existing metadata, then rewrite that data to the result image after manipulation.
We reported these issues to both vBulletin and XenForo devs at the time. Since the issue was disclosed to them years ago, I see no issue discussing the issues publicly here now. But as before, we still recommend using VaultWiki's image management tools over any forum's built-in tools (for any purpose), due to these issues.