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Graphics Tricks from the Command Line
An anonymous reader writes "There's nothing quite like command-line tools for handling large batches of tasks, and image manipulations are no exception. Web developers and administrators will appreciate the ability to handle large numbers of files easily, either at the command line or in scripts. This article presents the ImageMagick suite, a Linux toolkit for sizing, rotating, converting, and otherwise manipulating images, in a huge number of formats, whether one or a hundred at a time."
This seems like it could be useful for easy and fast (not always smart) integration into Web Applications. Its far easier to make a call to a command line image manipulation software than to call a library and do all the work yourself. Though I suppose with calling an application for the web, there may be security problems.
Well, for starters 'xv' is not free software and you have to purchase a license for non-commercial use, while ImageMagick is distributed under a BSD style license...
Do you have some code to change now?
...and, of course, FreeBSD has it in the ports tree. You would be amazed at the number of graphics (and other) ports that pull in the latest version of ImageMagick as a dependancy.
Mind you, NetPBM isn't under-represented, either.
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Here be Dragons
And of course, Windows. I wrote some stuff for a photographer with Perl,Tk, and ImageMagick, and it works fine on her W98 machine. Well, I would prefer something nicer than Tk, but it seemed like that was the best choice for cross platform with Perl.