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Graphics Tricks from the Command Line

Posted by michael on from the thumbnails-galore dept.

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."

5 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Gallery by L.+VeGas · · Score: 4, Informative

    ImageMagick is used quite a bit with online photo galleries. Here is one of the most popular.

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    Best Windows Freeware
    1. Re:Gallery by crisco · · Score: 4, Informative

      While it's true that ImageMagick is used quite often for online photo galleries and that Gallery is very popular, Gallery doesn't use ImageMagick (except for the forthcoming v2.0). Instead, it uses NetPBM, another set of opensource image manipulation tools that deserve a little pimping along with ImageMagick.

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      Bleh!

    2. Re:Gallery by L.+VeGas · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not true, but an understandable mistake.

      The latest version of Gallery (1.3.4) can and does use ImageMagick as well as NetPBM. I know many that have it running on their sites. It's just that Gallery's documentation is poor and rarely updated.

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      Best Windows Freeware
  2. I Love Image Magick! by szyzyg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I used to use it a lot back when I was doing astronomy, I used to make movies and I wrote a load of scripts for IM which basically worked on directories full of jpegs to do crossfades, motion blur, and all sorts of other effects. Some of these movies of asteroids and comets still make it onto the occasional TV slot. The originals were rendered in POV ray, but IM was more important since it was essential for editing and compositing.
    It still runs today producing the map of asteroids (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/), even though I've moved on a long time ago.
    For a while I even used ImageMagick as the core for a webcam motion detection program - rescale, blur, edge-detect, subtract differences and then count the total intensity of the output image - it worked pretty well, although it was a little slow.

    I think I've created more art with ImageMagick than I've done with the Gimp.

  3. Wonderful program by digerata · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've used ImageMagick for a few years now, mostly for image processing on the backend of web application. It is great as far as the shear number of file formats it supports. I haven't seen any other 'free' application out there that does what ImageMagick does. Its speed is okay compared to commercial equivalents such as Image Alchemy.

    But the downfall of Image Magick is the installation. It is the most god awful spaghetti mess of all time when it comes to its dependancies. You see, what they don't tell you right off the bat is ImageMagick doesn't actually work with the file formats internally. AFAIK, it relies on all of the format specific libraries out there. If your application is hosted by a virtual hosting provider, good luck getting all that installed.

    Once it *is* installed, however, IM rocks.

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