ImageMagick: Command-line Tools
Author: ImageMagick Studio LLC
Description: ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100) including GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, TIFF, and DPX. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves. ImageMagick is free software delivered as a ready-to-run binary distribution or as source code that you can freely use, copy, modify, and distribute. Its license is compatible with the GPL. It runs on all major operating systems. The functionality of ImageMagick is typically utilized from the command line or you can use the features from programs written in your favorite programming language. Choose from these interfaces: MagickCore (C), MagickWand (C), ChMagick (Ch), Magick++ (C++), JMagick (Java), L-Magick (Lisp), PascalMagick (Pascal), PerlMagick (Perl), MagickWand for PHP (P [cell cut: 1167 characters, first 1000 kept]
Keywords: command-line, tools, ImageMagick, ImageMagic, MagickCore, MagickWand, PerlMagick, Magick++, RMagick, PythonMagick, JMagick, TclMagick, Image, Magick, Magic, Wand, ImageMagickObject, Swiss, Army, Knife, Image, Processing

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PerlMagick
Magick++
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ImageMagick includes a number of command-line utilities for manipulating images. Most of you are probably accustomed to editing images one at a time with a graphical user interface (GUI) with such programs as gimp or Photoshop. However, a GUI is not always convenient. Suppose you want to process an image dynamically from a web script or you want to apply the same operations to many images or repeat a specific operation at different times to the same or different image. For these types of operations, the command-line image processing utility is appropriate.

The ImageMagick command-line tools exit with a status of 0 if the command line arguments have a proper syntax and no problems are encountered. Expect a descriptive message and an exit status of 1 if any exception occurs such as improper syntax, a problem reading or writing an image, or any other problem that prevents the command from completing successfully.

In the paragraphs below, find a short description for each command-line tool. Click on the program name to get details about the program usage and a list of command-line options that alters how the program behaves. If you are just getting acquainted with ImageMagick, start with the convert program. Be sure to peruse Anthony Thyssen's tutorial on how to use ImageMagick utilities to convert, compose, or edit images from the command-line.

## animate

animate an image sequence on any X server.

## compare

mathematically and visually annotate the difference between an image and its reconstruction.

## composite

overlap one image over another.

## conjure

interpret and execute scripts written in the Magick Scripting Language (MSL).

## convert

convert between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more.

## display

display an image or image sequence on any X server.

## identify

describe the format and characteristics of one or more image files.

## import

save any visible window on an X server and outputs it as an image file. You can capture a single window, the entire screen, or any rectangular portion of the screen.

## mogrify

resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. Mogrify overwrites the original image file, whereas, convert writes to a different image file.

## montage

create a composite image by combining several separate images. The images are tiled on the composite image optionally adorned with a border, frame, image name, and more.

## stream

a lightweight tool to stream one or more pixel components of the image or portion of the image to your choice of storage formats. It writes the pixel components as they are read from the input image a row at a time making `stream` desirable when working with large images or when you require raw pixel components.

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