What Is It?

ImageMagick is a software suite designed to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. ImageMagick can translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

Created by ImageMagick Studio LLC, ImageMagick is free software delivered as a ready-to-run binary distribution or as source code that users may freely use, copy, modify, and distribute. Its license is compatible with the GPL.

Who Is it For?

ImageMagick is designed for inexperienced and experienced users. The software is designed to do everything from managing the family photos to embarking on a project that involves millions of images. This tool is popular, and at least two books and many tutorials have been written by users who have found ways to manipulate the program for various effects and usage. Additionally, the site contains tons of information about how to use ImageMagick, including the architecture behind the process and other resources.

With that said, inexperienced users might find ImageMagick intimidating at first. The learning curve seems complicated at first glance; although once the user begins to read the online materials at the ImageMagick site, he or she might realize that the writers created resources that are easy to understand. If the user is familiar with Photoshop or Gimp, then this product should be fairly easy to utilize.

Features

The “magick” behind ImageMagick is the ImageMagick ability to use a number of ready-made ImageMagick interfaces to modify or create images automatically and dynamically. This capability allows users to process an image dynamically from a Web script or apply the same operations as those used in Photoshop or Gimp to many images. Users also can repeat a specific operation at different times to the same or to a different image.

For these types of operations, the command-line image processing utility is appropriate. Users can use various languages to complete these tasks, including C, C++, Java, .NET, and more. The language chosen would depend upon the features installed upon the user’s computer (see below).

Compatibility

Users can install from source for Windows or Linux compatibility. Binary options for Linux, Windows, and MacOS also are available. According to the Web site, “the functionality of ImageMagick is typically utilized from the command line or you can use the features from programs written in your favorite programming language.” Choose from numerous interfaces including PerlMagick (Perl), RMagick (Ruby), PythonMagick (Python) and more.

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