ImageMagick, Part 1
ImageMagick is a package of tools for creating and editing images that’s not easy to get started with, but is well worth the effort. Here’s an introduction, just in time for processing those summer photos.
Thursday, June 15th, 2006
Just in time for your summer (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway) vacation photos, let’s look at image hacking with
ImageMagick (
http://www.imagemagick.org/).
ImageMagick (or IM for short) is a package of programs for creating and manipulating images: photographs, vector and raster drawings, and more. It’s been in development for almost twenty years, and a lot has changed since it was first posted to
comp.archives on
Usenet in 1990. The package is freely-redistributable, although some parts of the code came from other packages and have different license terms. See
http://studio.imagemagick.org/script/license.php and
http://studio.imagemagick.org/script/notice.php.
Most of the tools work from the command-line, at a shell prompt, and also, of course, from scripts and anywhere else you can run a program. ImageMagick has multiple APIs — for C, Ch, C++,Java, Lisp, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl/Tk — but we’ll cover the command-line here.
Not everything you’d want to do to an image is easy to specify by typing text on a command-line, of course. But for some jobs, especially repetitive tasks like resizing or annotating a series of images, tools like IM are fastest. IM also has many more features than you’ll find in simpler GUI tools. There are Windows and Macintosh versions of IM, and one for Cygwin too.
