I’ve upgraded ImageMagick on iOcean to the latest release, 6.2.5. ImageMagick is a set of libraries for creating, manipulating, and converting images. There are some built-in command line tools that interface with these libraries, as well as interfaces for many common programming languages. In the process of installing ImageMagick I’ve also updated the jpeg and png libraries on iOcean. Additionally, I’ve installed the Image-Magick-Thumbnail module for Perl (the basic interface for Perl, PerlMagick, came bundled with the ImageMagick install). I’ll be installing a PHP interface in the near future - there are a few out there and I’m not sure yet which one I’ll be installing.

The reason I went through the trouble of installing these software packages is so that I could write an image gallery generator script. The last few galleries I’ve put up have been more time consuming than they really need to be, especially creating thumbnails for each image, so I’m going to write a helper Perl script. I’m curious to hear if anyone else has any other uses for scripted image manipulation.