So let’s jump right in to doing some simple, but useful, conversion tasks with ImageMagick. Also, you can go to pretty much any Linux computer and know that ImageMagick is available - its ubiquity makes it a useful tool to know how to use. It is a suite of command-line programs for converting and manipulating images.īut why would you use a command line program to work with images, which are by definition, graphical? Well, for a start, you don’t have to load up a slow (and dare I say bloated) graphical app just to achieve a simple conversion task: you can fire off the command and have the result done in no time. The two most common commands are mogrify and convert, where mogrify overwrites the existing image and convert saves the image as a new image without modifying the original image.While you might associate working with images with big graphical programs like GIMP or Photoshop, ImageMagick is an entirely different animal.

If ImageMagick is not pre-installed on your system you can follow the installation instructions which are pretty straight forward for the various operating systems. The various command-line tools can be seen in the documentation and their usage can be seen in the examples.

It can be incorporated into shell scripts, batch files or through other programs for automatic processing of images. ImageMagick can do a lot of different graphics editing tasks and it even can create new images from the command-line. Here I’ll introduce a few common commands I had to look up multiple times. One tool I commonly use in these desperate situations is ImageMagick, which is a powerful tool when automating raster and vector image processing.

There are times being stuck with a load of images that need to be cropped, resized or converted, but doing this by hand in an image editor is tedious work. Creating Optimized GIFs in the Command-Line.

Linux imagemagick convert quality