The ImageMagick (IM) suite of command-line graphics tools is a free software staple; Linux, other Unix-like operating systems, and proprietary OSes like Windows have supported IM for close to two decades. But there is also an alternative tool called GraphicsMagick (GM) that covers much of the same functionality. How do you know which one is right for you?

Many times a simple screencast showing how to do something by using a series of screenshots in sequence in a video can explain what paragraph after paragraph of words cannot. Linux and a few open source applications make the job of creating such screencasts easy.

There are several ways to grab screenshots in Linux. The method that I employ here is a shell script that uses the ImageMagick import program:

The book's 335 pages are organized into a dozen chapters, following an introduction and a few other standard sections, including a forward written by ImageMagick's principal architect, Christy, who briefly explains the product's 20 years of history, development, and lack of decent documentation. That is where this book is intended to fill the gap, and Christy notes that most future questions about ImageMagick will be answered by pointing people to this book, as is also noted on ImageMagick's homepage.

You might think that working on the command line means you are sentenced to a desktop without graphics or digital images. But that's wrong thinking. You may also be surprised to learn that some popular GUI applications for image processing can also be used from the CLI. Today we'll take a look at three tools for capturing, displaying, and massaging images from the CLI. They are all (import, display, and mogrify) part of ImageMagick.

The greatest advantage of having command-line applications such as the ImageMagick suite is that one can create scripts to do all the image processing. That's what Brazillian programmer Eduardo Sztokbant did. He created shalbum, a shell script that uses ImageMagick to do all the image processing required to create a Web album, and released the program under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Since shalbum is a shell script that does not require any installation or dependencies, except for ImageMagick, it should run on all flavors of Linux and Unix.

ImageMagick (IM) is a command-line graphics creation and editing application. In a previous article we used it to add text and frames to images, and for other basic image manipulation. In this article we'll use the ImageMagick suite of commands to create a multi-image mosaic, draw some basic shapes, and create 3D logos.

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.

In this article we look at some spells the wizard of ImageMagick can do using a collection of graphic tools as his raw ingredients and the shell as his magic wand.

ImageMagick is a collection of graphic tools to work with images. The tools are display, import, animate, montage, convert, mogrify, identify and combine.