How to Install Imagemagick on a Linux Server

If you’re dealing with image processing, you should probably know that one of the most powerful and flexible software is Imagemagick. Here is the description from the official site:

ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. 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.

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: G2F (Ada), MagickCore (C), MagickWand (C), ChMagick (Ch), ImageMagickObject (COM+), Magick++ (C++), JMagick (Java), L-Magick (Lisp), NMagick (Neko/haXe), MagickNet (.NET), PascalMagick (Pascal), PerlMagick (Perl), MagickWand for PHP (PHP), IMagick (PHP), PythonMagick (Python), RMagick (Ruby), or TclMagick (Tcl/TK). With a language interface, use ImageMagick to modify or create images dynamically and automagically.

We will compile Imagemagick from source, as it is suitable for most Linux systems. You’re welcome to find rpm packages if you like them so much, but if you compile it from source, you will be able to access most functions, that Imagemagick provides.

We will need to search for source files first. I have taken the most recent version here. We will download it to our server using wget.

wget http://ftp.nluug.nl/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.5.9-1.tar.gz

Then we will extract it:

tar -zxvf ImageMagick-6.5.9-1.tar.gz

And will perform our usual compilation operations

./configure

Then (this step has taken about 5-6 minutes.

make

And finally

make install

Now your Imagemagick should be ready. Have fun!