

Better than ImageMagick: GraphicsMagick - bhseo
http://www.graphicsmagick.org/

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kogir
I imagine they've fixed it by now, but both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick
leaked memory last time I used them, which made them unsuitable for use in a
long running process handling millions of images.

Switching to FreeImage not only allowed for cleaner code, it was faster and
didn't leak.

<http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/>

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akamaka
My biggest problem with ImageMagick is the command-line API. I never use it
enough to learn it off by heart, but it's not intuitive enough to quickly pick
up again when I need it.

Unfortunately, GraphicsMagick seems to use the same paradigm, so from my
perspective, it isn't better at all.

Can anyone suggest any other libraries?

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kree10
They are pretty much the same, but GraphicsMagick's big CLI improvement over
ImageMagick is that everything's based off an executable called 'gm'. IM's
horribly generic 'convert' becomes 'gm convert', etc.

I'm not going to defend their CLIs beyond that though. The fact that 'mogrify'
modifies an image file in-place and 'convert' doesn't has bitten me more than
once.

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naz
It's funny how they boast a quarter of a million lines of code as though that
is a low number for an image library.

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tptacek
RMagick doesn't work with GraphicsMagick, which kills it for me. Almost
everything we do with ImageMagick we effectively do offline (with Compass CSS
hooks).

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viniosity
There's also FreeImage which works well with Image Science (a lightweight
alternative to rmagick). It's what I use in almost all my production
environments when I need performance over a ton of features.

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tptacek
Yeah, I need drawing, not thumbnailing. But ImageScience is pretty nice.

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endergen
Neat, thanks to the creator for this one.

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leej
Why not GD? I havent used it heavy image processing but it seems like GD is as
capable as ImageMagick

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wizard_2
GD2 has improved greatly with time (like adding gif support) but while I
haven't tested them in about a year - ImageMagic/Graphics Magic uses much less
memory for large images and outputs a much cleaner output. They also support a
larger set of features and require less processing power.

It really depends on what you need them for - I'm not sure how to draw with
imagemagic while I know how to do it with GD in php (though if you know
neither I'd go with imagemagic). But whenever I need to generate thumbnails or
work with photos I use imagemagic because I get a much better output quicker.

