imagemagick: Graphics, ungraphically

I am sitting and staring at the screen now, unsure really what I could say about imagemagick that would astound or inspire.

I have a feeling that most people have heard of imagemagick, even if they don’t ever use it.

I for one use almost daily, in particular when I convert the framebuffer images to animated gifs that I use (sometimes) for these pages.

That’s only one small slice of what imagemagick can do though. If you really want to expand your horizons, here’s the man page for convert, which is only one of about 10 tools that come in the imagemagick bundle.

For most people, a command-line-based image editing tool is counterintuitive. After all, what good does it do you to edit an image if you can’t see it?

And there’s some truth to that. If I have one image that needs adjusting and I can’t be sure exactly where the cropping needs to happen, the Gimp is probably a better tool.

But imagine I have a hundred, or a thousand images that all need the same crop, at the same location to the same dimensions.

You could tinker with batch mode in Gimp, or you could just loop them all through imagemagick, and then go back to playing Minetest.

And for some, the beauty of imagemagick is that it doesn’t need a graphical component. Imagine a server that accepts images, then resizes them to fit certain dimensions. Again, no need for the intern to run each one through the Gimp, for hours every day.

There’s a tool for every job, and sometimes the best tool doesn’t need a visual interface. But that’s what I’ve been saying for years. … 🙄