What is ImageMagick

ImageMagick^TM, version 4.2.9, is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write, and manipulate an image in any of the more popular image formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, and Photo CD. With ImageMagick you can create GIFs dynamically making it suitable for Web applications.

 

You can also resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save your completed work in the same or differing image format.

 

Here are just a few examples of what ImageMagick can do:

Convert an image from one format to another (e.g. TIFF to JPEG)

Resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image

Create a montage of image tumbnails

Create a transparent image suitable for use on the Web

Turn a group of images into a GIF animation sequence

Create a composite image by combining several separate images

Draw shapes or text on an image

Decorate an image with a border or frame

Describe the format and characteristics of an image

You can access ImageMagick functions directly from the command line using the ImageMagick tools convert, mogrify, montage, combine, or identify. Use the display program to interactively manipulate your images or animate an image sequence from a graphical panel. Finally you have access to the various image processing methods directly from your favorite application development environment: Perl, C++, C, or Java. These programs and much more are explained by following the links from this page or read the ImageMagick Users Guide.

ImageMagick is known to compile and run on virtually any Unix. system and Linux. It also runs under Windows NT, Windows 95, Macintosh, VMS, and OS2. See the install guide for compiling instructions. Pre-compiled binaries are available for some of the more popular operating systems. The entire source and binary distribution is also available for a limited time on CD.

Developers will probably be interested in the latest source from the ImageMagick anonymous CVS server.

You can subscribe to the mailing list. Here you can ask questions and get advice from other ImageMagick users and see announcements of bug fixes, enhancements, and new releases.

Although the software is copyrighted, it is available for free and can be redistributed without fee.

Because ImageMagick is freeware, I am unwilling to certify that it is Y2K Compliant. However I am confident that it is. ImageMagick uses localtime to produce time-stamps for encoding PDF and Postscript output. It also uses system routines such as select to produce suitable sub-second delays when animating an image sequence.
 

How Can I Find Out More About ImageMagick

For detailed information about the ImageMagick command line utilities, select from these sources:

ImageMagick Tools

Frequently Asked Questions

Magick Image File Format

ImageMagick's color reduction algorithm

What's New

How You Can Help

 

Get the ImageMagick source or binary distributions from here:

ImageMagick Download Sites

Concurrent Version System

 

You can access ImageMagick capabilities from a number of application interfaces:

Magick Application Programming Interface

Object-oriented Perl Interface to ImageMagick

Object-oriented C++ Interface to ImageMagick

Object-oriented Python Interface to ImageMagick

Object-oriented Java Interface to ImageMagick

 

Here are a few miscellaneous uses of ImageMagick:

Common Desktop Environment Screen Saver

Motif GUI for Animate

3-D Web Screamers

 

Related Sites

Here is a list of ImageMagick related sites that you might want to visit:

ImageMagick Studio

WebMagick Image Navigator

The Bitmap Information Tool

Tripod's Banner Builder

The Banner Generator

Microsoft Vision SDK

Anthony's Icon Library

Equinox

Image manipulation software that works like magic.