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Usually when we talk about programs for editing images we think to graphic programs such as The Gimp or photoshop, but they are not the only alternative.
While you might associate working with images with big graphical programs like GIMP or Photoshop, ImageMagick is an entirely different animal. It is a suite of command-line programs for converting and manipulating images.
Using a command line tool like ImageMagick for image processing may sound a really counter-intuitive thing to do but there’s no need to do everything on a case by case interactive basis. Image resizing and format conversion come to mind here.
There's nothing quite like command-line tools for handling large batches of tasks, and image manipulations are no exception. Web developers and administrators will appreciate the ability to handle large numbers of files easily, either at the command line or in scripts.
It can be used from the command line for quick needs or built into a more complex software suite. This guide will cover some of the most “magical” features of ImageMagick and provide examples of how to use it to solve everyday tasks.
ImageMagick is a great tool! Many times it has saved me from programming. Here is just one example of many applications of the ImageMagick that can save one's time.
images2mpg, a simple utility that's part of the KDE Image Plugin Interface (KIPI), lets you create an MPEG file from image files. Relying on a handful of command-line tools including the ImageMagick suite and mjpegtools, images2mpg creates wonderful videos from your images and even lets you insert your favorite song as the background. It supports SVCD, DVD, VCD, and XVCD video formats.
The composite command from ImageMagick provides an easy way to watermark images. Without too much work you can write a script to do batch processing of your images. This way you can watermark a whole directory of images at once.