I have recently been playing with imagemagick under windows, and I really love it, it is much more easier to play with than GD. The commands are small and really easy to understand. In this entry I am going to review a few things that I have been doing with imagemagick.

From playing around uploading, croping, converting and resizing the image I found that they actually give the same result but by using Imagemagick it is much faster. Below I have used this image..

as the original image and then uploaded it and made a thumbnail out of it with a size constraint of 200×200 which then gave me the following in GD:

and then the following in imagemagick:

Now you would see that there is not much difference between them except in size. (The GD generated 2kb less than the imagemagick generated thumbnail). From a developer point of view imagemagick is somehow much easier to code with than GD aswell as quality, even though it is 2kb more than GD’s thumbnail image it gives a much better image and it is faster and easier to understand.

Some other things that I found very cool with imagemagick is that within its command you can turn all your png’s, jpg’s, gif’s on your server onto any format within 1-2 lines of code.

I really like both GD’s and IM’s functionality so I added both of them in my list of global classes for icelabz which will be used throughout the whole of the icelabz system.

The only thing that stops most of us from using imagemagick is our webhost, site5 does allow imagemagick aswell as hostgator. Just check with your host before purchasing or else request them to install it, it is worth it if you want some easy, fast and good quality generated images on the fly.